[opensuse-factory] error messages of the package manager stack considered harmful

11 Apr 2007

      Hi folks:

Errors and informative messages that comes from zypp/yast and related
stuff are just ..well ..plain horrible..:-(

In this mail I attempted to summarize the problems (although there are
many more..and are easy to find) the main issue is this stuff is not
user friendly and people gets confused...

1. zypper emits this messages when the connection to the server timeouts.

   Please insert media [sic] [ Curl error (huh ?) http://server...

- I **do know** it uses Curl  but..is the user supposed to be informed
about  that too? also I "cannot insert media" when the repository is an
URI, wording is incorrect .. in that case I expect something like
"cannot access installation source  $URI..." ( nope, "metadata"
,"resolvable" or
whatever geeky wording that requires to know what )

the low-level continues with...

Error code : Unrecognized error  --> oops, error not handled ;P

Error message : connect() timed out --> What the &$&%/&%... who else
than programmers know what connect() function call means ?

<humor> maybe add to it , "if you dont known what connect() or CURL is,
install the glibc-devel and curl-devel packages and RTFM" </humor>

2. probably the most infamous one is thrown when yast or other tools are
accessign the zypp database...

"A ZYpp transaction is already in progress." [.....] and then what x_X ?

again, I do know what a "ZYpp transaction" is, but this one is very
confuse, it does not tell the user what to do and why "is already in
progress" also, Im not sure if the end user really needs to know what a
ZYPP transaction is.. probably soemthing like "$SOFTWARENAME is already
 open and working with the package manager database...[more..] "...

3. zypper is too silent and combined with the slowness it gaves the
impression to the user as it were hanging, unfortunately it lacks of
some progress dialog and the -v is too verbose.. :-(

4. Some of the "Y" and "N" dialogs are awfully broken, in problem number
1 , there is a final "retry" dialog that appears.. press Y .. it does
nothing :) also if you press no..other low-level I/O error messages
appear... in other situations if you type other data rather than "Y" or
"N" it does not recover and hangs foreva...

5. In Yast, when a package is locked and there is a conflict a popup
dialog appears telling me in one of its options "unlock all
resolvables".. geeky wording again :) shouldnt it say "unlock all needed
packages" or something adecuate to a graphical UI designed to be used
for people that does not have a **single clue** how Zypp/yast/whatever
works internally ?

6. Stuff in zypp the throws exceptions :
  We all know this is useful for debugging.. but why show it to users ?
why not a simple dialog:

"An error ocurred : (short **clear**  message) \n
 Error details has been written to
**/unique/filename/of/the/errormessages-backtrace.txt
 please open a bug report attaching this file to the report.+(an accept
dialog where applicable)".

In general, everytime you see the errors messages, think " does the user
will need to visit the wiki or read some manual to understand this ? "
if the answer is yes, then the error message is bad.;-)

There are **many** other examples, this mail only attempts to raise
awareness of this general problem.

Just my $2 chilean pesos.

Cristian.

ps: I already filled bug reports about some of this issues but no sign
of activity till today.

Cristian Rodriguez R.

Jan Kupec

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