Ladislav Slezak wrote:
The problem is that the desktop selection cannot be easily replaced by the pattern selection because there are several technical and UX issues:
1) The pattern selector [2] contains the "Details" button which starts the full package selection [3]. That means the user can also select individual packages, change some package management flags, etc...
That means we would need to disable (remove) that button and this would require a change in the API between the Ruby code and the libyui frontends (ncurses, Qt).
When a user clicks on the software selection in the proposal screen he would get to the very same dialogs today already, right? Ie not much of a difference except that the user gets the chance earlier. So I wouldn't mind if the button stays.
2) Another problem is that after manual pattern selection we would need to remember the selected patterns. The software selection can be reset later in the installation proposal in some specific situations.
In the past there was a combobox which allowed resetting the proposal explicitly by user, that's gone. But IIRC the reset still could be invoked by YaST itself... And in that case we need to restore the original user selection.
Could you detect the reset and require the user to redo the software selection if the user chose the custom option? YaST doesn't have to remember everything.
3) Selecting the individual patterns might a bit strange from UX POV I think. If you choose KDE or GNOME you can still change the selected patterns or packages later in the SW proposal.
Would it make more sense to just offer the "Text mode" and/or "Minimal X" options and leave the user to modify/extend that later? We would probably need to mention this fact directly at the desktop dialog as currently it's not clear that the package selection can be fine tuned (or even change completely) later...
The custom option I am asking for is basically a replacement for the minimal X option. Showing the pattern selection as next dialog is meant to avoid giving the impression that we want to suppress other choices.
So the question is what is actually the use case behind? Ludwig, what you want to achieve or what's the problem with the current approach? The issue mentions only obsolete or unmaintained XFCE or E17n, could we simply remove them and offer something else?
The problem with the current approach is that we don't know what lead to the current state. Why do we list XFCE but not Mate? Why E but not Lxqt? We cannot fill that screen with all options and we cannot fit all of them on the DVD. So we have to focus and the focus is on KDE, GNOME and the Server selection. Nevertheless we need an easy way for enthusiasts to install the alternative choices. The secondary choices should be displayed equally, we make no promises or recommend one over the other. cu Ludwig -- (o_ Ludwig Nussel //\ V_/_ http://www.suse.com/ SUSE Linux GmbH, GF: Felix Imendörffer, Jane Smithard, Graham Norton, HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: yast-devel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: yast-devel+owner@opensuse.org