PackagingToolsUsability

Revision 3 as of 2007-11-13 19:23:47

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Please check the status of this specification in Launchpad before editing it. If it is Approved, contact the Assignee or another knowledgeable person before making changes.

Summary

The packaging tools we ship are highly visible and are a important part of the ubuntu desktop experience. This spec reivews them to make sure we do a good job here.

The usability review covers the GUI packaging tools for:

  • Review text to ensure grammarness
  • Cleanup
  • General review

Because Ubuntu 8.04 will be a an LTS release, we want to make small conservative changes. We will not be doing anything big like:

  • switching to PackageKit tools

  • implementing session management for the tools
  • localizing changelogs

Release Note

TBD

Rationale

A review of UI experts is important for the hardy LTS release.

Design

Cross-application ideas

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.

A consistent icon for "supported by Canonical" should be used for synaptic and gnome-app-install. Preferable part of a icon theme.

update-manager

  • Show packages as applications, like gnome-app-install does. Sebastien Heinlein will work on this so it can be considered for 8.04 vs. 8.10. And show non-application packages under a new categories section that is collapsed by default.
  • Improve changes to not shows some cryptic text for security updates, but instead:
  • 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)

gnome-app-install

  • make uninstall easier
    • Not obvious how to get a list of installed applications.
    • change text in Show: "Installed Applications" to "Only installed applications"
  • make list sortable by checkbox install/uninstall (like synaptic), this makes it easy to see only applications that are not installed
  • Would be nice to have web links or images in the application description at the bottom.
    • Web links should go to launchpad in case they change after release
    • Use the "homepage" field if available
  • Could remove Preferences button and have it just within synaptic (relevant functionality is already provided by the drop-down menus)
  • Search is currently NOT global if you have a category selected - this is not obvious at all
    • could move search bar to indicate what it is searching
    • could have extra bars appear when you do a search
    • there is also some wasted space in the lower left
  • "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.

synaptic

"This application is supported by the distribution" isn't understandable, we need to find a better way to explain this. GtkTreeView now supports tooltips better, we could use that.

Test/Demo Plan

TBD

Outstanding Issues

UpdateManager

  • Check if we can optimize better for the vertical space

Gdebi

* Double clicking a .deb file is beyond normal use case

  • Huh? This happens quite frequently, see getdeb.net ...

The following applications were not discussed:

  • apturl integration
  • adept
  • adept_installer
  • adept_updater

CategorySpec