Two questions here:
1. The Configuration Browser is nice, but it still doesn't provide any kind of description for the packages. I mean, looking at the list of packages, I can probably guess what "Dependency Analyser" does, but I have exactly zero chance in guessing what Epicea, Ephestos, Illiad, Kendrick, Mandrill, Marina, Pastell, Pillar or Ston are about. Even a single line description, displayed in a tooltip, would be a huge improvement. Can this be added?
Yes this is so true. You are 100% right this is why I started to code a catalog extracted from configurationOf. https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/PharoProjectCatalog/ but it seems that recent changes broke it.
2. SmalltalkHub seems to have no way of browsing all available packages. When I'm starting with Pharo and I don't know how some library I need is called, I'm essentially out of luck: I need to do much googling or ask on a mailing list, which both take more time than it should. I see that " The following is a preview of the exploration features of SmalltalkHub. More to come!" message is still there - I remember it from a year or more back. Is this considered such a low priority task, or is it just that nobody had enough time to work on it? Yes you are again right. The person developing Smalltalkhub left and quit Smalltalk against all our expectations.
By the way: there is no package description on many package pages. Even squeaksource tended to have at least one sentence explaining the purpose of a package (I think?).
There is a package named "Catalog", I don't know how many people is putting effort on it right now. I think it needs some love.
Ok, that's very nice, although the number of "Please project owner add catalog description" and mention of "MetaRepoForPharo20" is a little discouraging.
Yes but if people do not see a value to document how can we do it.
One more question: besides asking on a mailing list, is there any other way of learning about it? Is it linked from somewhere, or does it need a lot of googling and luck (ie. googling for "pharo catalog packages" doesn't return this link, at least on the first page of results). right now this is just a experiment. Two years ago I asked inria to pay an engineer to help us solving this issue but they thought that with one engineer he can do everything.
In general I have a feeling that discoverability of Pharo packages is very bad right now. It's a serious problem for new users, and even to a bit more advanced users who return to Pharo after some time of not following announcements.
I agree.
Now i feel like having a multiclipboard would be useful (i have one on my OS but anyway...)
There seems to be a support for this in Pharo 3.0: under right click in an editor you have Paste and Paste... menu items. The latter displays a thing that I think is supposed to be a list of recently copied things.
My problem, however, is that this doesn't work with OS clipboard (on Linux). Ctrl+V and Right click->paste don't work at all with OS clipboard (they do when copying things inside Pharo). X Window systems have 2 clipboards: one normal and the other called "X selection" - it seems that the latter is not checked at all, and normal clipboard is being accessed by Clipboard>>clipboardText (when Alt+p on "Clipboard default clipboardText"), but it still doesn't work with Ctrl+V. Strange.
Anyway, I have a very specific (side-)project in mind and I'm going to try using Pharo for it, so you can expect quite a bit more questions from me :)
Best regards, Piotr Klibert