[Wylug-discuss] Fwd: Formatting MP3 Player

[Smylers]

A year ago I wrote:

> 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.

Since then it turns out somebody's found a way to make a bad situation
even worse.

Today I wanted, for the first time since the above, to reconfigure disk
partitions, and -- possibly because of writing the above rant --
actually remembered that the command I want is called Palimpsest.

Except that it isn't, any more.

At some point Palimpsest has been renamed. Having tracked tracked down
where it had got to, I admit that its new name, Gnome Disks, is entirely
reasonable. As is the new command name, gnome-disks. But finding it
involved a web search.

Surely it would've been trivial to have a transitional period of either
name working, by making palimpsest be a symbolic link to gnome-disks? Or
by replacing palimpsest with a one-line shell script consisting of an
echo command advising of the new name?

It seems ridiculous to make existing command-line users have to play
'hunt where this command has gone'.

Grrr.

Smylers
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