Bug 248668

Summary:	yast ncurses interface not equivalent to the qt-gui
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 10.2	Reporter:	Stefan Seifert <nine>
Component:	YaST2	Assignee:	Katarina Machalkova <kmachalkova>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:	Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	aj
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	Other
OS:	Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Other	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Stefan Seifert 2007-02-24 23:18:37 UTC

man yast2 tells: "YaST2  comes  with  three  frontends:  GTK  , QT and ncurses.  All frontends are functionally equivalent."

This is not true. The ncurses interface is not able to do all things that the qt gui can.

The ncurses interface of the software management does not feature the important options All Packages/Update if newer versions available and All in this list/Update if newer versions available. This would be the recommended way to update packages (for example from packman) and people like me, who like the ncurses interface more have a real hard time finding out about how to do that. On servers one often even does not have a qt-gui.

When trying to add a new virtual machine, yast even tells one:
"Virtual machine installation requires access to a graphical environment."

It's currently impossible to manage xen domains with yast if no xorg (for X forwarding) is installed on the server.

Comment 1 Ladislav Slezák 2007-02-27 13:56:33 UTC

(A hint: You can use 'zypper' - it's a command line tool for package management...)

(The problem with Xen installation is known, the problem is that an xterm window is opened for the new VM.)

Comment 2 Katarina Machalkova 2007-02-27 15:18:45 UTC

Yeah, I know ncurses interface is not fully compatible with Qt frontend. I'm planning to change that (e.g. reorganize menus, add some functionality,...), but it was already too late for 10.2. Expect some changes in 10.3

As for the 'Update if newer version is available' thing: 
I've added exactly this functionality into yast2-ncurses 2.15.3 (see bug #227043). Just go to Actions-> All Listed Packages-> Update if newer version available, and you're there :-) The fact is, that it works meanwhile only for all _listed_ packages, not all packages, but you can easily work that around by selecting Filter-> Installed packages
If you'd like to try it, just grab yast2-ncurses >= 2.15.3 from the Factory.

If you have any other suggestions, or ideas how can ncurses package manager be improved, I'm all ears :-)

Comment 3 Katarina Machalkova 2007-03-05 09:43:36 UTC

Ping :-)

Is there anything that is missing in ncurses UI which Qt interface has (except for 'update if newer version available' thingy)?

If so, let me know. Otherwise I'll close this as a duplicate of bug #227043

Comment 4 Stefan Seifert 2007-03-05 09:54:08 UTC

None that I'm currently aware of. Which perhaps means, that I should use the qt GUI more often :)

Comment 5 Katarina Machalkova 2007-03-05 09:59:43 UTC



*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 227043 ***