[packagekit] Initial impressions from 0.1.1 on rawhide

[Richard Hughes]

On Fri, 2007-10-26 at 09:26 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> I was giving Robins packages a test drive last night, here are some
> unsorted impressions, mostly ui details. Of course, I left out all the
> cool things that work nicely, and only nitpick on the details that are
> not quite right yet...

Cool, thanks - criticism is good, as I know you'll help with patches :-)

> pk-prefs: The wording is a bit unclear in "Install updates
> automatically when on battery power". It could do with an "even"
> inserted at the right spot, or reword it completely.

Yes, I'm rubbish at this sort of thing:

"Install updates automatically even when on battery power" sounds good
to me unless anyone can come up with anything better.

> pk-application:
> - would be nice to fill the treeview incrementally

We do, although yum gives us the results in one lump right at the end.
I'm pretty sure it's a limitation of what we do. Tim, is that correct?

> - when moving the selection around or unselecting, the details pane is
> not kept uptodate.

Well, for each click we have to do a GetDetails for the clicked item,
which can take a few hundred ms for the round trip. Are you seeing a
substantial delay? I think we need to more aggressively kill tasks if
the user just clicks a lot in the search results.

> Also, the search field is not cleared (not sure it
> should)

I think it's a feature that it's not...

> - after clicking on Depends or Requires, there is no way back

Yes, I was thinking of putting these two in a treeview in the tabs,
although we would have to duplicate the whole package listview in a tiny
window. Ideas welcome on how to solve that.

> - the meaning of the icons in the treeview is not really obvious

Sure, agreed, Andreas is doing some tango ones for us this week
hopefully.

> - getting dependencies seems very slow, and has no progress indication

I get the moving "unknown percentage" sliders from todays git, so I
guess that one has already been fixed.

> - the find button is insensitive when the search entry is empty, so
> there is no way to list all packages

That takes a long time and is a massive amount of data. What's the
use-case for this?

> - why can't I search for "a" ?

You'll get many thousands of replies and your CPU usage will go through
the roof. Why would you want to?

> - when I try to get Requires, I get both a dialog and a bubble telling
> me that this functionality is not supported. The bubble is too much

Agreed. I'll fix this now. We have to use the bubble for some errors, as
sometimes we have no UI as we are being run automatically in the
background. For this case, it's bad.

Also, we shouldn't advertise the button if we can't do it - get-requires
is listed in "pkcon get actions" - although it's listed as not
implemented in the yumBackend.py file. I've just fixed that so the
button should be grayed out for yum.

> pk-update-viewer:
> - pretty slow to start up

To show the window, or to show the packages?

> - refresh seems to hang for a long time in the middle (it finishes eventually)

Sure, it's downloading the data I guess. I think the git version is much
better at percentage spinning now.

> pk-backend-status:
> - seems to lie about the ability of the yum backend to report Requires

Fixed by the above checkin.

> - it also claims that the yum backend can install local files.
> pk-install-file disagrees

Hmm, this might be fixed, as it just worked for me just now. What error
do you get?

> pk-update-icon:
> - the media-player like wait icon is really meaningless. why show an
> icon for that at all ?

Well, if you do "yum -y update" on the console, and then use
pk-application then not a lot happens, and this is a way of showing the
user that we are waiting for something. The icon sucks, but we're
working on that.

> general:
> - the progress bars in the status bar make the ui look too busy, imo.
> In most places a wait cursor would probably be more subtle, and enough
> to indicate activity.

Sure, I just wanted to show the user how much of the total transaction
was complete - and I quite like them now :-)

Thanks for your help,

Richard.