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[OT] An easier database

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  [OT] An easier database Leandro Noferini <lnoferin@cybervalley.org> - 2018-07-22 23:50 +0200
    Re: [OT] An easier database Ben Caradoc-Davies <ben@transient.nz> - 2018-07-23 00:20 +0200
    Re: [OT] An easier database The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> - 2018-07-23 01:20 +0200
      Re: [OT] An easier database David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2018-07-23 20:10 +0200
        Re: [OT] An easier database Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org> - 2018-07-24 11:50 +0200
          Re: [OT] An easier database David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2018-07-24 18:00 +0200
            Re: [OT] An easier database Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org> - 2018-07-25 12:10 +0200
              Re: Re: [OT] An easier database Clive Standbridge <list-user@tgstandbridges.plus.com> - 2018-07-25 20:40 +0200
                Re: [OT] An easier database Ric Moore <wayward4now@gmail.com> - 2018-07-25 21:10 +0200
                  Re: [OT] An easier database Zenaan Harkness <zenaan@freedbms.net> - 2018-07-27 00:50 +0200
    Re: [OT] An easier database David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> - 2018-07-24 06:20 +0200

#197922 — [OT] An easier database

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Ciao a tutti,

some friends with no computing skills need to catalog some objects with
some features like components, costs and images. I gave a look to base
in libreoffice suite but it looks too difficult to use and to mantain.

Is there something easier to use in linux/debian?

Something like filemaker of years ago.

-- 
Ciao
leandro
http://6xukrlqedfabdjrb.onion/blog/
Alla bellezza preferisco la verità.
E il dubbio è l'unità di misura.

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#197924

On 23/07/18 09:26, Leandro Noferini wrote:
> Ciao a tutti,
> some friends with no computing skills need to catalog some objects with
> some features like components, costs and images. I gave a look to base
> in libreoffice suite but it looks too difficult to use and to mantain.
> Is there something easier to use in linux/debian?
> Something like filemaker of years ago.

For simple lists, a Google Sheets spreadsheet enables collaborative 
editing. It supports images in cells by reference with =IMAGE("URL").

How many records, and do they need relations between tables? What are 
the reporting requirements and use-cases? How many users? What access 
control? Input validation? Do you need the ability to roll back bad changes?

If you want a proper database, I use and recommend postgresql because it 
scales from tiny to massive applications and just keeps on working 
without much intervention.

Kind regards,

-- 
Ben Caradoc-Davies <ben@transient.nz>
Director
Transient Software Limited <https://transient.nz/>
New Zealand

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#197927

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On 2018-07-22 at 17:26, Leandro Noferini wrote:

> Ciao a tutti,
> 
> some friends with no computing skills need to catalog some objects
> with some features like components, costs and images. I gave a look
> to base in libreoffice suite but it looks too difficult to use and to
> mantain.
> 
> Is there something easier to use in linux/debian?
> 
> Something like filemaker of years ago.

Without knowing what their project actually looks like, just based on
that description, the thing that springs first to my mind is tellico.
It's a collection-management program, and while its predefined
"collection of what?" categories probably don't cover what your friends
need, it's allegedly extensible with custom collection-type definitions.

It's not strictly a database, but for a sufficiently simple type of
collection inventory it's good enough, and the UI is better than any
full database solution I've personally encountered. (Which, to be fair,
is not saying particularly much.)

Personally I'd be happier if there were an option to have it use a
database backend instead of an XML backend, but nothing I've used it for
has ever gotten big enough for that to become a concern.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.         -- George Bernard Shaw

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#197945

On Sun 22 Jul 2018 at 19:14:40 (-0400), The Wanderer wrote:
> On 2018-07-22 at 17:26, Leandro Noferini wrote:
> 
> > Ciao a tutti,
> > 
> > some friends with no computing skills need to catalog some objects
> > with some features like components, costs and images. I gave a look
> > to base in libreoffice suite but it looks too difficult to use and to
> > mantain.
> > 
> > Is there something easier to use in linux/debian?
> > 
> > Something like filemaker of years ago.
> 
> Without knowing what their project actually looks like, just based on
> that description, the thing that springs first to my mind is tellico.
> It's a collection-management program, and while its predefined
> "collection of what?" categories probably don't cover what your friends
> need, it's allegedly extensible with custom collection-type definitions.
> 
> It's not strictly a database, but for a sufficiently simple type of
> collection inventory it's good enough, and the UI is better than any
> full database solution I've personally encountered. (Which, to be fair,
> is not saying particularly much.)

Without intending any criticism of the suggestion, particularly for
this use case where a DE might be assumed, it looks very heavy on
dependencies. On my system, it would require 90 packages minimum:

$ apt-get -s --no-install-recommends install tellico
[…]
The following additional packages will be installed:
  docbook-xml docbook-xsl kate-data katepart kde-runtime kde-runtime-data
  kdelibs-bin kdelibs5-data kdelibs5-plugins kdoctools lib¹
[…]
  ntrack-module-libnl-0 oxygen-icon-theme phonon phonon-backend-gstreamer
  phonon-backend-gstreamer-common plasma-scriptengine-javascript sgml-data
  soprano-daemon tellico-data tellico-scripts
Suggested packages:
  docbook docbook-dsssl docbook-defguide dbtoepub docbook-xsl-doc-html
  | docbook-xsl-doc-pdf | docbook-xsl-doc-text | docbook-xsl-doc
  docbook-xsl-saxon fop libsaxon-java libxalan2-java libxslthl-java xalan
  djvulibre-bin finger exiv2 fam iodbc hspell
  libqt4-declarative-folderlistmodel libqt4-declarative-gestures
  libqt4-declarative-particles libqt4-declarative-shaders qt4-qmlviewer
  libqt4-dev media-player-info phonon-backend-vlc gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly
  phonon4qt5-backend-gstreamer perlsgml w3-recs opensp virtuoso-minimal
Recommended packages:
  icoutils libcanberra-pulse | libcanberra-gstreamer sound-theme-freedesktop
  upower libqca2-plugins libqt4-sql-mysql | libqt4-sql-odbc | libqt4-sql-psql
  | libqt4-sql-sqlite | libqt4-sql-sqlite2 | libqt4-sql-ibase tellico-doc
  khelpcenter4
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  docbook-xml docbook-xsl kate-data katepart kde-runtime kde-runtime-data
  kdelibs-bin kdelibs5-data kdelibs5-plugins kdoctools lib¹
[…]
  ntrack-module-libnl-0 oxygen-icon-theme phonon phonon-backend-gstreamer
  phonon-backend-gstreamer-common plasma-scriptengine-javascript sgml-data
  soprano-daemon tellico tellico-data tellico-scripts
0 upgraded, 90 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

The eight recommendations in turn lead to 100 more packages:

$ apt-get -s install tellico
[…]
The following additional packages will be installed:
  docbook-xml docbook-xsl icoutils kate-data katepart kde-runtime
  kde-runtime-data kdelibs-bin kdelibs5-data kdelibs5-plugins kdoctools
  kdoctools5 khelpcenter khelpcenter4 kinit kio lib¹
[…]
  ntrack-module-libnl-0
  oxygen-icon-theme phonon phonon-backend-gstreamer
  phonon-backend-gstreamer-common phonon4qt5 phonon4qt5-backend-vlc
  plasma-scriptengine-javascript pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils rtkit sgml-data
  sonnet-plugins soprano-daemon sound-theme-freedesktop tellico-data
  tellico-doc tellico-scripts upower usbmuxd
Suggested packages:
  docbook docbook-dsssl docbook-defguide dbtoepub docbook-xsl-doc-html
  | docbook-xsl-doc-pdf | docbook-xsl-doc-text | docbook-xsl-doc
  docbook-xsl-saxon fop libsaxon-java libxalan2-java libxslthl-java xalan
  libterm-readline-gnu-perl | libterm-readline-perl-perl djvulibre-bin finger
  exiv2 fam libusbmuxd-tools iodbc hspell media-player-info
  libqt4-declarative-folderlistmodel libqt4-declarative-gestures
  libqt4-declarative-particles libqt4-declarative-shaders qt4-qmlviewer
  libqt4-dev phonon-backend-vlc gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly
  phonon4qt5-backend-gstreamer pavumeter pavucontrol paman paprefs perlsgml
  w3-recs opensp virtuoso-minimal
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  docbook-xml docbook-xsl icoutils kate-data katepart kde-runtime
  kde-runtime-data kdelibs-bin kdelibs5-data kdelibs5-plugins kdoctools
  kdoctools5 khelpcenter khelpcenter4 kinit kio lib¹
[…]
  ntrack-module-libnl-0
  oxygen-icon-theme phonon phonon-backend-gstreamer
  phonon-backend-gstreamer-common phonon4qt5 phonon4qt5-backend-vlc
  plasma-scriptengine-javascript pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils rtkit sgml-data
  sonnet-plugins soprano-daemon sound-theme-freedesktop tellico tellico-data
  tellico-doc tellico-scripts upower usbmuxd
0 upgraded, 190 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

¹ snipped all packages named lib* just to reduce the line count.

Never having seen or used it, it just seems a touch profligate.
I only post this as a warning to non-DE users.

Cheers,
David.

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#197953

On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 01:04:39PM -0500, David Wright wrote:
>Without intending any criticism of the suggestion, particularly for
>this use case where a DE might be assumed, it looks very heavy on
>dependencies. On my system, it would require 90 packages minimum:

Well, as you point out, one's mileage may vary. If you already have KDE
installed, then you'll likely have most of these dependencies already.
On my system, I didn't, and the concrete disk-usage for the dependencies
is as follows:

    10 upgraded, 164 newly installed, 0 to remove and 90 not upgraded.
    Need to get 107 MB of archives.
    After this operation, 296 MB of additional disk space will be used.

Worrying about such figures is an old habit (for me at least) that is
long overdue breaking. This is still a drop in the ocean for my /
partition, which even so is modestly sized by modern standards (92G).

I've installed single applications on Macs that are larger than this,
and I think that's often the case for Windows too.

If tellico proves to be useful, than this is a price well worth paying.
And if it doesn't, all this gets undone with a few simple apt commands.


-- 

⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Jonathan Dowland
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ https://jmtd.net
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Please do not CC me, I am subscribed to the list.

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#197958

On Tue 24 Jul 2018 at 10:45:23 (+0100), Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 01:04:39PM -0500, David Wright wrote:
> >Without intending any criticism of the suggestion, particularly for
> >this use case where a DE might be assumed, it looks very heavy on
> >dependencies. On my system, it would require 90 packages minimum:
> 
> Well, as you point out, one's mileage may vary. If you already have KDE
> installed, then you'll likely have most of these dependencies already.
> On my system, I didn't, and the concrete disk-usage for the dependencies
> is as follows:
> 
>    10 upgraded, 164 newly installed, 0 to remove and 90 not upgraded.
>    Need to get 107 MB of archives.
>    After this operation, 296 MB of additional disk space will be used.
> 
> Worrying about such figures is an old habit (for me at least) that is
> long overdue breaking. This is still a drop in the ocean for my /
> partition, which even so is modestly sized by modern standards (92G).
> 
> I've installed single applications on Macs that are larger than this,
> and I think that's often the case for Windows too.
> 
> If tellico proves to be useful, than this is a price well worth paying.
> And if it doesn't, all this gets undone with a few simple apt commands.

My post was a warning about numbers, not size. My advice in the recent
past has been for generosity in root partition sizes, though for many
people here (LVM users) this is not an issue.

Including Recommends, there are 190 packages (in my case) to check.
My previous post here on Saturday contained the lines
    "I only have ALSA installed: pulseaudio has always seemed to put
    more obstacles in the way rather than being of any help."
So what do we see in Monday's list?
    "plasma-scriptengine-javascript pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils rtkit sgml-data"

No, it's not a dependency, but it's just one more thing to have to
deal with, picking over which Recommends make a lot of sense to
install and which don't; hence the warning.

Cheers,
David.

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#197978

On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 10:49:53AM -0500, David Wright wrote:
[ re pulseaudio ]
>No, it's not a dependency, but it's just one more thing to have to
>deal with, picking over which Recommends make a lot of sense to
>install and which don't; hence the warning.

Apparently Endless¹ implemented a "recommends blacklist" to address a
similar situation. I'm aware of others who have built local empty
packages that conflict against things they never want to install
(systemd iirc). I've never tried either, so I can't vouch for their
efficacy. I wonder if it would be nice for apt to have a feature so that
a user could mark packages "never install".

¹ https://endlessos.com/

-- 

⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Jonathan Dowland
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ https://jmtd.net
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Please do not CC me, I am subscribed to the list.

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#197994

> I wonder if it would be nice for apt to have a feature so that a
> user could mark packages "never install".

That feature is APT pinning. You can achieve "never install" by
creating a file in /etc/apt/preferences.d,
e.g. /etc/apt/preferences.d/local-blacklist, containing something like

Package: unwanted-package other-unwanted-package
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -1


The apt_preferences(5) man page is the reference. As it says, a
priority value P < 0 prevents the version from being installed,
although I don't think it removes already-installed packages.

-- 
Cheers,
Clive

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#197996

On 07/25/2018 02:00 PM, Clive Standbridge wrote:
>> I wonder if it would be nice for apt to have a feature so that a
>> user could mark packages "never install".

Anyone remember "File Cabinet" for Win3.1? It didn't get easier than 
that! Ric


-- 
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html

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#198034

On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 03:02:29PM -0400, Ric Moore wrote:
> On 07/25/2018 02:00 PM, Clive Standbridge wrote:
> > > I wonder if it would be nice for apt to have a feature so that a
> > > user could mark packages "never install".
> 
> Anyone remember "File Cabinet" for Win3.1? It didn't get easier than that! Ric

ISTR when Microsoft came out with their "cabinet" file format (W95
days? can't remember) that the first time I saw a .CAB file it gave
me immediate mental indigestion as I did a double take and
immediately Altavista'ed it or something...

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#197951

On 07/22/18 14:26, Leandro Noferini wrote:
> Ciao a tutti,
> 
> some friends with no computing skills need to catalog some objects with
> some features like components, costs and images. I gave a look to base
> in libreoffice suite but it looks too difficult to use and to mantain.
> 
> Is there something easier to use in linux/debian?
> 
> Something like filemaker of years ago.

Filemaker still exists:

     https://store.filemaker.com/individuals

     FileMaker for Individuals

     Purchase single licenses of FileMaker Pro Advanced.

     US$540.00


Searching Apt:

     2018-07-23 20:48:13 dpchrist@vstretch ~
     $ apt-cache search filemaker
     kexi - integrated database environment for the Calligra Suite


STFW:

     http://kexi-project.org/

     KEXI is an open source visual database applications creator,
     a long-awaited competitor for programs like MS Access
     or Filemaker.


If you liked FileMaker, Kexi might be worth investigating.



I missed out on HyperCard back in the day, but people who could afford 
Macintoshes loved it:

 
https://web.archive.org/web/20150605191133/http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568

     Why Hypercard Had to Die


Apt:

     2018-07-23 20:48:18 dpchrist@vstretch ~
     $ apt-cache search hypercard


STFW:

 
https://web.archive.org/web/20150602121312/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard#Similar_systems


It would help if you told us more about your requirements and use-cases 
-- e.g. flat-file, relational database, data modeling language, data 
manipulation language, scripting language, desktop, LAN, Internet, 
single-user, multi-user, IDE, native client, browser client (WWW 
server), SOAP, F/OSS, free as in beer, commercial, app licensing fees, 
support, etc.


David

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