Re: gnome-apt screenshot, more questions
On Nov 26, Havoc Pennington decided to present us with:
>
> After making some changes, I put a screenshot at
> http://www.debian.org/~hp/gnome-apt.gif
Ok, my comments:
1: I didn't like the checkboxes:
1a: There should be "purge" too.
1b: They're mutually exclusive, so at the very least they
should be radio buttons.
1c: You should also display the current status, and what was
the previously selected action, a la dselect
1d: Why change "hold" for "keep"? Of course "keep" sounds
better, but why introduce a UI incompatibility?
1e: Visually, I think the action selection would look better
using that popup-selection widget (don't know the name of the
corresponding GTK widget, but I mean the one that corresponds
to a non-multiple <select> HTML tag)
2: I find the current version of the tree hard to swallow; if I
want to imagine myself using gnome-apt, I have to mentally add
the "+/-" buttons :-) Of course the final version will have
these, so ignore this comment...
3: bash depends on libc5, ncurses3.0 and libreadline2;
libreadline2 depends on libc5 and ncurses3.0. I think that, by
default, libc5 and ncurses3.0 shouldn't be listed under
libreadline2, since the purpose of the relationship listing is
to know what packages you would have to install, and duplicates
make little or no sense in this context.
4: I definitely don't like the package info (gdeb or not) on the
top. I'd like it either on the bottom or to the left. But then
again, this is GNOME; I think the best thing we could do is
leave these options to the user - give as options top, bottom,
left, right (yuck), and separate top-level window as Wichert
said.
5: I maintain thatg deb would be good to use (with the notebook
- more on it later). The "Relationships" page is good to have
even when the dependencies are already in the tree, because
whatever its interface will be, it will be clearer (more
newbie-friendly) than the tree. Of course, once someone got the
knack of what the tree means, it makes things faster (so it's
more power-user-friendly). So we should keep both.
> I took out the text widget, and for now there are just two blank spaces
> and a label that gives the name of the selected package.
Ok, here are my thoughts about using-or-not gdeb.
As I said, the position should be configurable. The interfaces I
find most friendly are:
Top or bottom:
/----------------+----------------\
| name and short | |
| description | gdeb's |
+----------------+ notebook |
+ action buttons | |
\----------------+----------------/
Left, right or separate window:
/----------------\
| name and short |
| description |
+----------------+
| |
| gdeb's |
| notebook |
| |
+----------------+
| action buttons |
\----------------/
Where "name and short description" is the stuff above the
notebook in the gdeb screenshots.
The action buttons (actualy, likely radio buttons) are redundant
with the tree, yes, but if you change the ones in the tree to a
select as I proposed, then this redundant copy gives a more
newbie-friendly interface The best would be 4 radio buttons,
each of them with full text explaining the option name like:
(x) Hold - leave package in its current state
( ) Install - install or upgrade the package
( ) Remove - uninstall the package, leaving its configuration behind
( ) Purge - uninstall the package, deleting its configuration
Then comes the part I've been thinking of:
ALL OF THIS SHOULD BE CONFIGURABLE OUT.
Have one option somewhere to omit the action buttons, one to
omit the name-and-short-description box, and one to display the
notebook in some other format.
Notebook options, the way I see it:
* Notebook
* Get rid of the tabs and display only one page - Info by
default; then if you want to see Relationships or Special you
can choose it in some menu (probably Package)
* Stuck everything in a VBox or HBox - ugly, but some people
would definitely want it
Hmm... why must all my mail to this list get over 100 lines? :-)
[]s,
|alo
+----
--
And the sign said the words of the prophets
are written on the subway walls and tenement halls
and wispered in the sounds of silence
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