Hi Roger,

Thanks for all the information, I'm too short on time to read it now, but will try to do so later this week.

Kind regards,
Marja

CC: (none) => marja11

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software page: default  should be all

Again best wishes for the new year and again my apologies for taking up so much of your time

Summary: volunteering YES! + IGNORE THE PUTATIVE PROBLEM (see the note) => Some comments that I had prepared for Cauldron 7

The comments that I wrote before I uploaded seem to have disappeared so I will repeat them.

I started off by wishing you and the Mageia team happy holidays and a wonderful new year.

I am an end user of Mageia. I have tried man of the applications. Here are some of things that I have noted over the years.

1. It is not always clear from the generic description what the software does and sometimes it does not work (or at least I am unable to determine how). An example of this is are the various flow chart softwares. At the other extreme is Imagemagik. Unless one knows ahead of time that this is made up of various sub-commands, this wonderful software will  not even be looked at.

2. Sometimes the command does  not correspond to the name of the software, e.g
pavucontrol is the command for PulseAudio Volume Contro

3. Sometimes a one line note would save a lot of time and frustratioin, e.g. Octave. There is a GUI listed which I did not download, but then spent 45 minutes trying to figure why the GUI kept appearing.

4. Sometimes the descriptions are misleading. See the snapshots of Texlive

5. Sometimes I think that some software is obsolete or at least another one should be added. See the snapshots with the Libertine fonts.

6. The default on the software page should be "ALL", not "GUI". If I have not downloaded for a while I end up trying to understand why a certain software is not there.

I will make some specific suggestions related to the above later on.

Roger

Hi Roger,

Wonderful new year to you, too.

I do finally understand what you'd like to help improve, thanks :-)


It's about many different issues, please file a separate bug report for each separate issue, even if it is in the same software, as explained here https://wiki.mageia.org/en/How_to_report_a_bug_properly
That way the reports can be assigned to the right packagers, who can then look into them to see what can and should be done here, one issue at a time, or what needs to be reported upstream or cannot be fixed.


The pavucontrol command comes from the pavucontrol software http://madb.mageia.org/package/show/name/pavucontrol 
so the package name and the command match. Would you like us to have a wiki page like this one https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio ?
If so, you could file a bug report for our documentation team to add it (or you could add it yourself ;-) )

About rpmdrake: wouldn't changing the default to ALL instead of GUI confuse newbies _much_ _more_ than keeping the current default confuses you?

Of course, if a GUI packages is not listed among the GUI packages then a bug report is needed to fix that!

Hi Roger,

Sorry if my last comment discouraged you!

For a start, I'll ask the texlive and the octave maintainers to look at your screenshots & comments and then tell whether they need bug reports. 


@ Shlomi and Marc

Can you please help Roger?

CC: (none) => mageia, shlomif

@roger: I'm not sure, if I get your point. There is no need to have xetex in order to use latex with unicode (utf-8) support.
And I don't think we are able to change the description on external websites such as libertine-fonts.org  .
The font libertine is already available as ttf font (fonts-ttf-libertine). If you use pdflatex to produce pdf files, you can just use the desired ttf-font in your document.
If I don't get your point, please be a bit more specific.

[Bug_24022.txt]


Since I was not very clear previously, I decided, before 
answering the comments and continuing with my suggestions, 
it would be best to have some concrete examples. To this 
end I wrote up new material and revised existing material 
on my mathematics  department web page:
http://people.math.carleton.ca/~rhfischl/]

These are certainly not the only way to present the 
material, but they were written from my pedagogical 
viewpoint, "If you want to do A, then use software B in the 
following step-by-step way."  
                                       ----- 
To start with, let us look at the comment (my emphasis in 
capital letters):
"Re: difference Debian vs. Mageia" Postby JoesCat » Sep 
3rd, '18, 02:10
.....
Mageia is a mainly desktop distro and borrows a bit from 
Fedora but also has things Fedora won't have. 
....
PCLinux was a Mandrake fork, I've tried it, but find I like 
Mageia better. 
....
Now let us look at a  Distrowatch commentary on Mageia 6:
"Mageia 6 is very nice. WHILE NOT MUCH DIFFERENT FROM MANY 
OF THE OTHER MODERN DISTRIBUTIONS, it comes with enough 
polish and extra features to make it worth checking out. 

Now here is another comment from distrowatch, this one by 
Jessie Smith  in her review of Manjaro (she has stated 
similar things in the past):
Sometimes after I write a review people will e-mail me and 
ask, in so many words, "Never mind the overview, WHY WOULD 
I USE THIS DISTRIBUTION OVER ANOTHER ONE?"

From these comments, and others it is clear to me that 
people
have trouble choosing. it thus seems to me that MAGEIA 
should take several steps to differentiate itself from 
other distributions.

I have several suggestions to make.  I include links to the 
material that I have put up so as to give you a better idea.

Suggestion I. 
First of all the following wikis 
[https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Documentation] are very good:
     Wiki » First steps with KDE
     Wiki » First steps with Linux and Mageia
     Wiki » steps with the command line and useful  examples
     
     However consider the following wiki:
      Wiki » List of applications
  The KDE links are reasonably good and lead to 
instructions , but click on "TAR". This will discourage 
any new person [I intend to add a "how to TAR" link on my page]
    
  Further a glance and searches will suggest to the new/old 
user that the emphasis is on "softer" software (games, 
music .)

  Not listed are what I would call  "hard" software: tex, 
octave, qraphviz, imagemagick ... (more on this below).
  
  I am not suggesting any changes to this wiki. What I am 
suggesting is a wiki with subsections /or  separate wikis 
with contributions by users. Let me go to Tex and fonts 
again and try to explain what I was getting at. 
  
   --- Comment #27 from Marc Krämer 
<mageia@mokraemer.de> ---
          @roger: I'm not sure, if I get your point. 
          
          The points that I were  trying to make  were that 
unless one tells you about a lot of these things you are 
not going to know (and will probably never know).
          
There is no need to do all the work of rewriting software 
decriptions.
===> just put a star next to Texlive so potential 
users would know that someone in the Mageia community has some 
information that could be of use, e.g.:
http://people.math.carleton.ca/~rhfischl/HOW_TO/HOW_TO.html
 
 or  they could contribute shell files:
http://people.math.carleton.ca/~rhfischl/SHELL_FILES/
SHELL_FILES.html

As another type of example, if you are 
going to use Tex, and hopefully XeTex, you should know about 
sources of UNICODE information and fonts as in the following:
  
http://people.math.carleton.ca/~rhfischl/DO_IT_YOURSELF_TEX/
sources_fonts_unicode.html

It would also be very helpful to you to know which of the 
packages  under TeXlive you need and do not need.

I could say the same thing about other software that I use.


Suggestion II.
What JoesCat suggests:
"For package comparisons, you can look at distrowatch to see 
WHO'S GOT LATEST/GREATEST."
is in my opinion the wrong approach to
take. Every distribution has lots and lots of games and many, many
applications. Who can possibly know what to choose? 

Here is another comment:
"Mageia-based distro?
Postby kiwibirds » Oct 7th, '18, 23:37
Hey all! I am thinking of making a distro for 
educational/just for fun purposes. I want to try and make 
it based on Mageia, but I don't know where to start. Could 
someone lead me on the right path? I really appreciate it!" 
 
===> What would really make  Mageia stand out are SPECIAL
INTEREST SUB-DISTRIBUTIONS.  I am afraid that I would be
of zero help to "kiwibird" (australian?) for games, but he
probably has some good suggestions to make.

  I think that a particular  sub-distribution that would 
really make Mageia stand out is a sub-distribution AIMED AT STUDENTS OF 
SCIENCE, ENGINEERING AND MATHEMATICS and people
in these fields. That is why I pointed 
out that  tex, octave, qraphviz, imagemagick, R ... are 
missing  from the list. Yet these are tools
  (perhaps scilab or matlab instead of octave) which every 
student in these fields will have to use.  I do  not know
how to do such things, but if informed I would be 
willing to submit a sub-distribution for consideration.

I recently was in communication with someone from Elsoff
(Westphalia, just on the border with Hesse) about  genealogical matters. 
He told me that his wife had studied mathematics, so I told him
about teaching Octave and using Linux. That is how I 
learned that in the homeland of KDE most high schools use 
Windows! I know that several countries  develop Linux 
distributions for schools, so why not "MAGEIA SCIENCE"?
 
Suggestion iii. The  Wiki » List of applications indicates favourites. So 
===> why not create a FAVOURITES category on the software 
page (while also keeping a link with gamers, sound etc).

Suggestion IV. There are just too many  *lib* files on the main page
and they prevent users from finding things. Type "tex" and you will 
see:
lib64exttextcat2.0_0 - Text categorization library​        
 
libexttextcat is an N-Gram-Based Text Categorization
library primarily intended for language guessing.

===> I suggest that you put all the lib* files in a separate 
category and put a symbol next to N-Gram to indicate 
that there are library files.

------------------------------------------

(In reply to roger herz-fischler from comment #28)

Thanks for the elaboration :-)
Sorry for lacking the time to reply to everything you wrote, I hope others will do a better job than me.

CC'ing AlexL, because he and his team have worked on "higher educational" Mageia ISOs.
Macxi and neoclust want(ed) educational ISOs, too, but for primary and/or secondary schools, so CC'ing them, too.

About our wiki: any user can already contribute to it, the only hindrance is that users need to request edit rights nowadays (since trolls made a mess of our wiki). CC'ing docteam for your suggestions about the wiki.

About Suggestion IV: which main page are you referring to?

CC: (none) => doc-bugs, loginov_alex, mageia, terraagua

Hi Roger,

I developed Educational distribution EduMagic based on Mageia https://sourceforge.net/projects/magicos/
It's for schools and universities.
At the moment I have more modern tecnologies to improove distribution to change initrd on uird.
But project is freezing. No interested people, no finances.
Other problem is dropping software. Maintainers do not care if packages are in use by somebody and drop them easy. A lot of educational software are old, but must be present in repo. They drop it. I restore. I had proposal do not drop software if somebody needs it, but no results. Just to publish list of candidates to be obsoleted. What did they think about when they droped monodevelop?!
When Mageia droped qt3 they do not care, that a lot of educational software are still qt3. Mageia deleted qt3-devel to block qt3 building.
At the moment it's time for qt5, but 5 educational programs are still qt4. If budget is zero, then they are qt4, but if to pay to freelancer they will be qt5 very soon.

(In reply to Alex Loginov from comment #30)
> When Mageia droped qt3 they do not care, that a lot of educational software
> are still qt3. Mageia deleted qt3-devel to block qt3 building.


are your serious ? :)

qt3 wasn't maintained upstream from a long time. We can't keep something that can have security issues.
We kept it as long as possible.

maybe you can send an email on dev ML about this educationnal flavour because i am intested in it. 

In my dreams we had a "abuledu" like based on mageia :)

I agree Mageia should not ship programs with security issues.

But seriously, there are much useful and essential old programs around.  So i think it would be good to facilitate (at least not hinder) users to build locally what they *need* and security concerns it is up to them.  Usually it is just isolation needed, like drop network, run in virtual machine, etc.

A local example is I must run WinXP for some programs needed for old machinery or else customer would loose hundredthousands dollar for a newer machine, and it is no problem as i do not let it connect to anything else.

CC: (none) => fri

> When Mageia droped qt3 they do not care, that a lot of educational software are still qt3.

s/are/were/

When you droped qt3 you had qt3 programs, that were not ported on qt4. Dropping all qt3 stack was wrong while not all were ported on qt4, it was not as long as it possible. Qt3 is developing by trinity. You had way to keep some qt3 applications.

​Please ​understand and accept that qt3 is dead for a long long long time now! like qt4... the future is in Qt5 so upstream should really working on that and nothing other!

Dead, unmaintained, broken, etc... should be dropped from a maintained official distribution release!

Thanks for your comprehension.

CC: (none) => geiger.david68210

I'm not about qt3 support right now, but to keep qt4 support and do not do same, that was done for qt3 before. While we have qt4 programs in repo to keep them as long as it possible. It's not about qt only.
Russian community supported educational qt3 programs at least 2 years after dropping qt3 by Mageia. And it was impossible to build educational distro using Mageia only repos. Mageia had way to support qt3 longer, but used way to drop it.

(In reply to David GEIGER from comment #34)
> ​Please ​understand and accept that qt3 is dead for a long long long time
> now! like qt4... the future is in Qt5 so upstream should really working on
> that and nothing other! 
> 
> Dead, unmaintained, broken, etc... should be dropped from a maintained
> official distribution release!

Agreed, but can't we do anything for really needed educational software for which there isn't an alternative? I'm thinking of a "Use at your own risk" repository, and having two educational isos. The first educational ISO would then be like a normal ISO, with all educational software from Core release. The 2nd would be use-at-your-own-risk and contain the "Risky" repository.


(In reply to Alex Loginov from comment #35)
> I'm not about qt3 support right now, but to keep qt4 support and do not do
> same, that was done for qt3 before. While we have qt4 programs in repo to
> keep them as long as it possible. It's not about qt only.
> Russian community supported educational qt3 programs at least 2 years after
> dropping qt3 by Mageia. And it was impossible to build educational distro
> using Mageia only repos. Mageia had way to support qt3 longer, but used way
> to drop it.

"Mageia had way to support qt3 longe".... That hurts!

I'm afraid Mageia didn't, by far, have the needed manpower to support it longer (just like many upstreams lack the manpower to port their software to newest 
Qt).

All qt3 software were ported on qt4, but 2 years more after Mageia droped it. Tqt3 is still developing. So I don't see real arguments to drop software easy just because of old qt.
All education distros Alt Linux, Open Suse, Debian support old software. EduMandriva had own repo too because of missing software in Mandriva repo and to have support for old hardware. Poor countries do not upgrade school computers.
So Mageia is the worst to be real educational distro. Needs to change position of dropping software.
Sometimes Mandriva kept old software, that were workable, but it were not rebuilt. Mageia is too strict.

> Dead, unmaintained, broken, etc... should be dropped from a maintained official distribution release!

Many users moved on Fedora already. Did you count how many? I counted. All people who were Mageia users and organized Mageia Russian community are Fedora or Rosa users now. Why? Unstable situation to loose software that in use. Fedora is more stable than Mageia. Rosa has community repository - Contrib.

We were away on holidays in Vancouver and Victoria (temperature around 0deg vs -20 in Ottawa) and I just had a chromebook with me. I thus read the interesting comments, but could not do anything.

I will add something here in a few days

 Marja Van Waes 2019-02-05 14:06:39 CET


About Suggestion IV: which main page are you referring to?
Hello again Marja. I was referring to the main software page; see the attached as an example. This comment was part of a general theme that to distinquish MAGEIA
from other distributions it should stand out in being "helpful". That is why I suggested putting all the lib files in its own category.  See now my suggestions
for the software management page. A note/link here would notify users of where to look and would reduce the number of files enormously

Created attachment 10851 [details]
suggestions for the software management page

Created attachment 10852 [details]
suggestions continued

Created attachment 10853 [details]
software management page continued

Created attachment 10854 [details]
I suggests that lib files shuld be put in their own categoru

As I stated there so many lib files that they just clutter up the software page.
The lib files that are absolutely needed with a given software are automatically suggestsed when ready to download.

(In reply to roger herz-fischler from comment #40)
>  Marja Van Waes 2019-02-05 14:06:39 CET
> 
> 
> About Suggestion IV: which main page are you referring to?
> Hello again Marja. I was referring to the main software page; see the
> attached as an example. This comment was part of a general theme that to
> distinquish MAGEIA
> from other distributions it should stand out in being "helpful". That is why
> I suggested putting all the lib files in its own category.  See now my
> suggestions
> for the software management page. A note/link here would notify users of
> where to look and would reduce the number of files enormously

(In reply to roger herz-fischler from comment #41)
> Created attachment 10851 [details]
> suggestions for the software management page

(In reply to roger herz-fischler from comment #42)
> Created attachment 10852 [details]
> suggestions continued

To me the above attachments look the same, I'm not sure from which applications page you'd like to see those links... from the one in MageiaWelcome?

(In reply to roger herz-fischler from comment #43)
> Created attachment 10853 [details]
> software management page continued

If the inline help (the one you see when clicking "Help" at the top of the page and then on "Help" in the drop-down menu) isn't good enough, wouldn't it then make more sense to improve the inline help? Users can install additional software from DVD without being connected to the internet.

(In reply to roger herz-fischler from comment #44)
> Created attachment 10854 [details]
> I suggests that lib files shuld be put in their own categoru
> 
> As I stated there so many lib files that they just clutter up the software
> page.
> The lib files that are absolutely needed with a given software are
> automatically suggestsed when ready to download.

I agree that for your "tex" search and probably for a lot of other searches, too, seeing loads of lib* packages isn't helpful.
There does indeed not seem to be an existing way to exclude the lib packages. Please file an enhancement request in our Bugzilla, requesting to make it possible in rpmdrake to exclude libraries in a search, like can be done for your "tex" search with urpmi (urpmq is a urpmi tool) in a terminal/konsole:

        urpmq -Y tex | grep -v "^lib"

Created attachment 10896 [details]
Help opened form MCC

(In reply to roger herz-fischler from comment #43)
> Created attachment 10853 [details]
> software management page continued

MCC already includes direct access to our documentation, not the wiki one, but packaged one, through the "Help" button.
If it is not yet installed, the rpm is installed in the current language if available, or in English.
Then it is displayed at the current page in an independent browser.
Papoteur

CC: (none) => yves.brungard_mageia

Hi, thanks for reporting this bug.
We are sorry, but we no longer maintains this version of Mageia. Please upgrade to the latest version and reopen this bug against that version if this bug exists there.
As a result we are setting this bug to CLOSED:OLD

CC: (none) => ouaurelien
Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => OLD