Muon Software Center needs "technical items" option

[Peter Lemieux]

Kubuntu 12.04b2

The division of Muon into separate "Package Manager" and "Software Center" applications creates unnecessary confusion for experienced users. This problem came to my attention when responding to a thread at UbuntuForums from someone trying to locate the NFS client. Searching the Software Center for "nfs" brings up only a Java-based FTP client with no ability to ferret out "nfs-common" or "nfs-kernel-server". Opening a thread at the forums about this made it clear that the KDE implementation of Ubuntu's Software Center application leaves out an important feature. The Ubuntu application offers an option to browse additional "technical items" from the repositories as well as the limited offerings displayed in the list from Software Center. I can't find any comparable feature in KDE's implementation of this application.

There most definitely needs to be a method for browsing all applications available from the repositories in the Software Center application, or else it and the Package Manager application need to be merged somehow. As it stands now, experienced users like me will need to bounce back and forth between the SC and PM applications to find a needed package.

For further information, see this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1954120

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Git commit 112811cb23b2e2779b9d917bc86b03e10955d83f by Jonathan Thomas.
Committed on 08/04/2012 at 17:52.
Pushed by jmthomas into branch 'master'.

Show the package name as a technical package's name, and its short description as the comment.
This is necessary for displaying technical packages in the MSC, since sorting by short desc. takes 11 seconds on 50,000 packages.

With this change, I've also made all of the non-categorized app views (E.g. per-origin ones) display technical packages by default.
I'll probably also add a runtime toggle so that the "Provided by Kubuntu" entry doesn't become *totally* unnavigable if somebody doesn't care about technical packages.

As a side effect, the Muon Updater now shows the package name for the updates in the "System Updates" category.

CCMAIL:<email address hidden>
FEATURE:294172
FIXED-IN:1.4.0

M +1 -4 installer/ApplicationWindow.cpp
M +3 -7 libmuon/Application.cpp

http://commits.kde.org/muon/112811cb23b2e2779b9d917bc86b03e10955d83f

diff --git a/installer/ApplicationWindow.cpp b/installer/ApplicationWindow.cpp
index 0841a77..1b3c87a 100644
--- a/installer/ApplicationWindow.cpp
+++ b/installer/ApplicationWindow.cpp
@@ -399,10 +399,7 @@ void ApplicationWindow::changeView(const QModelIndex &index)
             appView->setBackend(m_backend);
             appView->setStateFilter(stateFilter);
             appView->setOriginFilter(originFilter);
-
- if (originFilter != QLatin1String("Debian") && originFilter != QLatin1String("Ubuntu")) {
- appView->setShouldShowTechnical(true);
- }
+ appView->setShouldShowTechnical(true);
         }
         break;
         case CatView: {
diff --git a/libmuon/Application.cpp b/libmuon/Application.cpp
index 3d40295..f7fb6c3 100644
--- a/libmuon/Application.cpp
+++ b/libmuon/Application.cpp
@@ -84,8 +84,8 @@ QString Application::name()
     if (!m_isTechnical)
         return i18n(untranslatedName().toUtf8());

- // Technical packages use the package desc, which is translated by apt
- return m_package->shortDescription();
+ // Technical packages use the package name, which is untranslatable
+ return m_package->latin1Name();
 }

 QString Application::untranslatedName()
@@ -109,11 +109,7 @@ QString Application::comment()
         // Sometimes GenericName is used instead of Comment
         comment = getField("GenericName");
         if (comment.isEmpty()) {
- if (m_isTechnical) {
- return package()->name();
- } else {
- return package()->shortDescription();
- }
+ return package()->shortDescription();
         }
     }