Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (599 mails)

[Andreas Hanke <andreas.hanke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Ricardo Cruz schrieb:
> So with the Summer of Code over, it's time to announce the GTK+
> interface for Yast

So you're asking for feedback? Here we go ;-)

First, I just looked at it very shortly and tend to like it. For all
modules except the software management, it's the familiar UI we all
know, getting started with it is really easy. It's almost perfect.

But: Many users have serious problems with the software management, i.e.
 the package management and especially the patch management. I'm _not_
talking about functionality bugs here, but really the user interface.

The users are trying and trying and trying to find out which patches are
already installed and which ones they need, and they fail. Many users
simply don't get it without external help - the existing Qt frontend is
too hard to use.

And now there is a new Gtk frontend that is, again, substantially
different. Documenting and supporting this will be very difficult! After
looking at the Gtk version of the online_update module for 3 minutes, I
am still unable to determine which patches I need - there is just a list
with ~100 unticked checkboxes.

Which ones are interesting for me? No idea. Which ones are unneeded, and
for what reason? No idea. Actually I know that I have all patches, but
assuming that I didn't know that, I would have to conclude from the
empty checkboxes that not a single patch is installed on my system.

I don't know the reason, the reason seems to be missing functionality in
the underlying libraries. OK, but still, in the Qt frontend the
checkboxes at least have different colours, so it is hard, but possible
to determine the status of a patch. In the ncurses frontend it's even
possible to sort the patches by status.

What I want to have is an intuitive and, most importantly, _common_ view
on the patches. Maybe it could be possible to merge ideas from the now
three YaST frontends and agree on something that can be implemented
consistently for all frontends.

Explaining the online_update module should not require more than a
single wiki page with a single series of screenshots! Users are already
complaining about the too many totally different UIs. Zen-Updater is
totally different from Qt online_update and will stay different, OK, but
now Gtk online_update is again different while it shouldn't be.

This is the perspective of a user who explained the existing patch
management UIs to dozens of users and therefore has sort of an idea
about the problems users are again and again running into. Of course I
appreciate all the work you and the others are doing as developers ;-)

So please consider these points as well and try to make this thing
called YaST better documentable...

Andreas Hanke
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