Notices

So what I always wondered about:
What are the exact usecases to use red-pill mode in Application Manager?
Which shortcomings does red-pill mode work around so that it is needed at all?
What could be changed in Application Manager and the Maemo package maintenance infrastructure (e.g. for Harmattan) to not need this mode anymore?

Feedback and elaboration of exact use case examples welcome.

A person providing a deb with a category that is not user/ requires the person installing (trying to, anyway) the program from said deb to go into red-pill mode.

But, in all honesty: Only allowing debs to be installed in red-pill mode in Fremantle's Application Manager will almost certainly mean an increase in the usage of it.

Another situation where it may be used is when a package maintainer has updated a "data" package that an application uses but the maintainer has given this data package a non-user section because it would "clutter" the "Browse available appications" view otherwise.

I haven't had to use it in quite a while, but I remember having to use it all of the time in Chinook. Certain dependencies would always be missing from certain apps. Switching to Red Pill would make the dependencies available. Likewise, there used to be a number of "useful" things (e.g., Python bindings) that were only installable from Red Pill.

It was also fun to use just to see what was hidden there. I did a lot of "testing" on various libs and functionalities that way when I first got a tablet.

But, honestly, I haven't had to switch to Red Pill in over a year.

Tim

Does that matter if I use apt? Or are all packages available there always?

Application manager has never been able to pull depencies from repositories when installing .deb from disk.

Red pill for me: never used it, never will use it, never will instruct anybody else to use it.

Thanks, I stand corrected

I've never used red pill mode either (don't even know the sequence to enable it).

I think someone should get started on a quick port of gdebi, registered against .deb files so that people don't need to enable Red Pill mode for installing arbitrary packages from disk (e.g. downloads from forums), however with the ongoing push to Extras, the QA process etc. the number of times anybody should need to install a package in App Mgr which isn't in "user/" should be minimal.

The ones I can think of:

1. They want to install python-runtime so they can do some editing on the device. apt-get would do, or alternatively "python-runtime" could be the only "python-*" package available in user/programming, with an appropriate description.

qwerty12's example is another, but in that cirucmstance the author could just publish a small update of the main app which pulled in the new data package. Perhaps we should start thinking about (and creating a patch for) a way of marking a package "display for update, but not install".

So basically, red-pill is a "convenient" way to keep using the simple Application Manager UI for "dirty" tasks end user are not supposed to deal with - is that right?

It looks like in the absence of red-pill, still any user could perform the same tasks directly via apt and command line. And probably in a much better / cleaner way.

It would be good to gather more feedback since we are considering the possibility of removing it to keep things clear and separate.

I just found http://wiki.maemo.org/Red_Pill_mode

Thanks to the contributors!

I needed it to install the gstreamer-tools, to stream stuff from the webcam.