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. http://ci.inria.fr/
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?
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.
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).
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.
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