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• Launchpad Entry: packaging-tools-usability

• Packages affected: update-manager, gnome-app-install

Summary

For Ubuntu 8.04 we should make conservative changes to Add/Remove Programs, Synaptic, and Update Manager to make them simpler, more grammatical, and more consistent.

Release Note

None of these changes are important enough to feature in release notes.

Rationale

Ubuntu 8.04 will be a an LTS release, so we want to make small conservative improvements. We will not be doing anything big like switching to PackageKit tools, implementing session management, or localizing changelogs.

Design

Cross-application

• We should introduce a consistent icon for "supported by Canonical" (preferably part of an icon theme), and use it in Synaptic and Add/Remove Programs.

Update Manager

To make update descriptions understandable to more people, we should:

• Add a style guide to StableReleaseUpdates about writing user-facing changelogs. This should go into the https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates page.

  • Perhaps have a subset of the changelog entry guided to users, and then update manager would only show that, using a special syntax.

• SRU template in dch would be helpful, like the security update template.
• Remove the "from version to version" from update-manager since it's in the changelog entry as well (it's almost always something unusable anyway, like package0.9.2-ubuntu1 to package0.9.2-ubuntu2).

For other UI improvements, we should:

• Change "You can install n updates" to "You can install n updates."

• Remove the "Software updates correct errors" sentence from the "Starting Update Manager" and "Checking for Updates" windows, because the same sentence is already present in the main window.
• Align the text of "Download size:" exactly with the text of the "Check" and "Install Updates" buttons.
• Change "Downloading package files" to "Downloading Package Files".
• Remove the "The package files will be cached locally for installation" sentence, because it's not relevant.
• Abolish the "You can close the window now ( Close )" window.
• Stop telling me that "Software updates correct errors" etc when there are no updates to install. Instead, tell me what time you're next going to check for updates.
• Challenge: Show packages as applications, like gnome-app-install does, and show non-application packages in a new section that is collapsed by default. Sebastien Heinlein will work on this so it can be considered for 8.04 vs. 8.10.
• Challenge: Merge the "Downloading Package Files" and "Applying Changes" windows (and their progress bars).

Add/Remove Programs

To make it easier to uninstall applications, we should:

• Change "Installed applications" to "Installed applications only".
• Make the list sortable by the checkbox column (like in Synaptic), so that all installed applications can be listed first.

To make the categories and search more understandable, we should:

• Extend the category list to the top of the window, so it is no longer underneath the search field.

Synaptic

To relieve some annoyances, we should:

• Replace the "Search" button with a live search field.
• Fix Synaptic so that when someone adds a new repository, it doesn't tell them to click Reload, it just reloads automatically.

Test/Demo Plan

Since these changes are entirely in the UI, and we don't yet have a UI testing framework, they should be tested by human use.

Future work

• It would be nice to have a way to update only .deb repositories (we waste like 30 seconds of user interaction refreshing source packages in update manager, gnome-app-install, and synaptic). We do not want to disable source repos by default because the default way to install a source package in Ubuntu is apt-get source. We could rely on user to run apt-get update on a terminal if he wants updated source information.
• See if Update Manager can use vertical space better.
• Include Web links or images in the Add/Remove Applications description.
  • Web links should go to launchpad in case they change after release
  • Use the "homepage" field if available
• "Integrates well into the Ubuntu desktop" isn't understandable (emblem), we need a better text here.
  • The meaning itself is difficult to summarize into a tooltip: that it's a GTK application designed for Gnome or a KDE application designed for KDE. Since users reading this tooltip won't know what that means unless they already understand the difference between Gnome and KDE, it would be sufficient to simply provide an icon without any explanatory text, since the icon conveys the same information.

Not discussed

These applications were not discussed:

• apturl integration
• adept
• adept_installer
• adept_updater
• gdebi

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