Hi, these are some glitches I found in gnome-apt 0.3 (a lot of this is UI
stuff that seems not so good to me) I'm running Debian Potato with CVS Gnome
and GTK+ and the ThinIce theme.
* When apt is started, it defaults to grouping by letter. This is almost
useless; any of the other grouping mechanisms would be much better.
* Also, it would be nice to have several levels of grouping, so that I could
group packages by priority, then by section, and then by status, or by
status, then by priority, then by section, etc.
* I think that maybe (for example) contrib/comm, comm/, and non-free/comm
should all be in a hierarchical structure under comm when grouping by
section (so you have comm/, comm/contrib, and comm/non-free). This was
one of the more annoying aspects of dselect, and it's unfortunate that
apt seems to have preserved it.
* I think that single-clicking on the plus and minus signs in the tree should
expand the tree a level, as occurs with (almost) every other GUI program in
the world.
* The status and priority filters should either not be drop-down menus
(put them to the right of the package listing or in popup toolbars) or else
use the tearoff menu feature of GTK+. Users will likely often want to set
a number of settings in these menus, and having to click on the drop-down
box each time is a nuisance.
* Running the new apt on an old installation causes all packages to be
displayed as kept, with no way to change them to installed.
* Displaying dependencies as a subtree of the item seems somewhat strange
to me, but I don't have a suggestion for a better way right now.
* Use tooltips. There are a lot of non-obvious things in the interface
(D, K, I? Are those state markers? Why are they apparently not used? Why
can't I even toggle them off in the Columns menu?)
(A better thing would be to eliminate the non-obvious things, of course)
* I somehow accidentally marked a package (apt, no less) for deletion by
clicking on an innocuous-looking part of the window and now I can't
set it for install/keep again.
* As a result of that, gnome-apt is broken, but the status "would be
broken" overlaps with the section "admin" to its right.
* Why is the package state managed with a bunch of toggles? It seems to me
that a radio list would be better (it can't be set to be installed, removed,
and kept simultaneously) Also, there should be a way to change the package
state from the list, at least for the most common cases (maybe put a set
of radio buttons to the left of the list or some columns with a check mark
which appears in the column corresponding to the item's current state)
* I think that the dependancies should be listed as a tab on the left.
I'd expect the subtree of a package to be the contents of the package.
Also, the icons should be either replaced or supplemented with a verbal
description of its meaning. (The slashed O must be..Conflicts? And the
R is Replaces I guess. And the other funny diagonal thing must be Keep since
since that's what all my packages are set to)
Aside from the fact that I can't change any package's status except to remove
it (I can't even detoggle Remove) and the fact that all my packages are listed
as Keep (or is this Correct Behavior?), I think apt seems quite solid
technically. You really need to rework the interface NOW though, before
you commit yourself so far to this system that you don't want to back out.
Good luck finishing it up!
Daniel
(PS: I finally got my packages set back to Keep by randomly clicking in the
area to the left of the package name. I don't even think I necessarily
clicked under the "K" which I guess must be Keep. I really think you should
put radio buttons somewhere to the left of the package list which let you
change the state. Maybe between the package list and the description
area? Or maybe between the description and the information above it?)
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