[Wylug-discuss] Fwd: Formatting MP3 Player

[Smylers]

In April I ranted:

> 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.

Incredibly, somebody has actually managed to make the above situation
even worse:

Palimsest has been renamed Gnome Disks -- which is an entirely
reasonable name for it.

But the program file itself has been changed from /usr/bin/palimsest to
/usr/bin/gnome-disks, with no symlink or other mechanism for helping
with the transition. The palimsest command simply doesn't exist any
more.

So after I've finally learnt of this hard-to-discover command, it's
suddenly unavailable, and I've got to start hunting for it again. And of
course, apropos and aptitude search are no help, for the reasons
mentioned above.

Smylers
-- 
New series of TV puzzle show 'Only Connect' (some questions by me)
Mondays at 20:30 on BBC4, or iPlayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/onlyconnect