[Wylug-discuss] Fwd: Formatting MP3 Player

[Smylers]

Dave Fisher writes:

> On 12 April 2012 13:15, Smylers <Smylers at stripey.com> wrote:
> 
> > Shaun Laughey writes:
> > 
> > > It's called palimpset.
> > 
> > Yes, of course it is. Obvious really -- why didn't I think of that?!
> >
> > Moreover, why didn't I find it with apropos disk? Oh, because it
> > doesn't have a manual page, that's why -- presumably because having
> > made such an easy-to-use tool it's necessary to make it harder to
> > find, so as to preserve the Equilibrium of Linux User Hostility, or
> > something?
> 
> You've just described my experience of the gnome project's
> much-vaunted usability.
> 
> Apparently, manpages aren't usable enough to be used.
> 
> And literal names are just too generic and confusing to be found by
> lovely modern search-driven interfaces, so they're not used either
> e.g. palimsest, evince, totem, tomboy, etc, etc

Except that the graphical user-facing names often _are_ generic
descriptions -- often completely generic, with no distinguishing
features at all. Running the palimpsest command makes a window appear
entitled 'Disk Utility'.

A menu entry labelled 'Movie Player' starts an application with a window
entitled 'Movie Player', the word "totem" entirely hidden.

This can lead to the opposite problem of having found an application but
not knowing what its command is, making it hard to run it from a
terminal window, or even to get help by searching the web. And it's
particularly irritating if you install multiple alternative
applications, then have to guess by icon which one is which cos they're
all hiding their names.

Palimpsest is even worse, in that its Debian package is
gnome-disk-utility and "Palimpsest" doesn't even appear in the package's
short description, meaning that aptitude search palimsest doesn't find
it.

Bah.

And since you mentioned Evince, here's something I discovered last
night, when trying to sort out why Mutt no longer opens PDF attachments:
it's because the Debian Evince packager believes that /etc/mailcap
doesn't need supporting any more, because "we" have .desktop files, and
so has unilaterally pulled support:
http://packages.qa.debian.org/e/evince/news/20110630T014728Z.html

He claims mailcap is "legacy junk", so has dropped it, despite many
people pointing out that by current Debian policy it's the official way
of doing things: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=647272

His suggested alternative is to use gvfs-open, a command I hadn't heard
of until reading the above bug report and which -- guess what? --
doesn't have a manpage.

Unfortunately Ubuntu are deferring to him, meaning it is also blighted
by this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evince/+bug/893924

Grrr.

Smylers