On Friday 14 March 2008 11:25, Martin Schmidkunz wrote:
Therefore I suggest a simplification of the software management module and an integration of all software management related functions: http://en.opensuse.org/Usability/Softwaremanagement#Simplifying_Software_Ma nagement
The basic concept is: * searching and browsing of packages is the core function of software management and therefore prominent * less frequently used functions are moved to the menu bar Search and browse tabs:
That's inconsistent IMHO. There is a separate view for "Search", yet all the other views are hidden behind "Browse". The most important widget there is the "Filter" combo box which is just a less space consuming version of additional tabs for all the filter views we have.
* The somewhat difficult to understand status icons (install, taboo) are acompanied by some description to make them easier understandable
That text consumes a considerable amount of screen space. It will make the relevant parts of that table scroll out to the right. And now think about how much more screen space this will cost for more verbose languages like German or French. Learning icons is a one-time effort. And the textual descriptions for each of them have been here all the time; just look at the context menu you get when you right-click any of them.
* Search settings includes options for "Search in" (name, summary, description, RPM provides, RPM requires), "Search Mode", case sensitve yes/no.
Why is this hidden behind a button? This makes it a lot less accessible IMHO. And you have to remember your current settings. You might keep wondering why you don't get any results if you forgot that you changed something there.
* Disk usage was dropped.
That's BAD. A zillion users complained about it when this didn't work for a while during the libzypp migration. This is something many users want to have.
I think that in times of the current storage prices, this overview is outdated
This argument is true only for your new average electronics megastore PC. For users installing a file server for the basement or a surf machine built from old parts this is different. And IIRC S/390 users tend to allocate a lot less resources to any single virtual machine they install Linux on. And that's just a few examples.
* Dependency checks moved to the menu. I suppose that most users will use autocheck. For those who prefer a manual check, maybe we can create a shortcut
I am not so sure about the future of manual dependency check either. We might choose to do auto-checking only. From what I see and hear of the new SAT-solver this might make sense.
The menu bar (please note that some entries will have check boxes (e.g. autocheck dependencies) I was just not able to create them with qt designer) * Software: includes all settings from current software management module.
You can't have a menu entry "Software" in a package selector. It's ALL about software. This needs to be more specific. And stuffing everything in there that makes up the functionality of this package selector and putting other, mostly irrelevant stuff to the top level menu instead is disregarding what users want to do with this tool. Veto.
The package all in this lists option can be integrated into the "package" sub menu. Mge came once up with the idea to connect software management with bugzilla, so I put a "Report a Bug" item.
Why here, and not at all the other places where bugs might occur (all the configuration modules)? This is inconsistent. If you look at any KDE application, you will find "Report bug" in the "Help" menu. This is where this kind of thing belongs, and this is where users are used to look for it. BTW if MGE wants this, please inform him that he also has to come up with an infrastructure like the KDE project has to filter out duplicates etc.. You can't do this without this kind of first-level-filter-out-useless-stuff mechanism. And that has to be in place before we add any such menu entry.
* Online Update: "run online update" and "settings" will start the corresponding YaST modules
As far as users are concerned, "online update" is just another view on the same level as all the others. It's even technically implemented like that. (Hint: Press F2 in the package selector).
* Novell Customer Center: "Register" starts corresponding YaST module, "Start NCC" opens NCC in a browser.
While Novell marketing will love us for putting that stuff so prominently there as a top-level menu item, I am sure that 98% of all users will just hate it. For users it's just a nuissance. If you do it at all, you do it once in the life time of your system. You don't want to be bothered with irrelevant stuff like that all the time on that level. If we have to put this anywhere (which so far nobody even requested AFAIK), it has to go somewhere else - somewhere in a "Settings" menu or something similar.
Maybe this menu point is more interesting for SLES
It will annoy SLES users just as much as openSUSE users. I am pretty sure that customers who want to use the Novell customer center have a completely different workflow when it comes to software installation anyway. They are not going to let individual users mess with packages. They deploy software in different ways.
and if there is any need to hide the term registration from the community users, then we just give the baby a different name :-)
* Repositories: opens the corresponding YaST module. I suggest to integrate the repositories according to FATE #303458 Simplifiying Software Management
Repositories make sense here. Unlike the others, this makes sense on this level. What is missing from the menu is all the important stuff. I don't see anything about packages, about patches, about help, about settings. CU -- Stefan Hundhammer <sh@suse.de> Penguin by conviction. YaST2 Development SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Nürnberg, Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: yast-devel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: yast-devel+help@opensuse.org