[packagekit] Initial impressions from 0.1.1 on rawhide

[Matthias Clasen]

On 10/26/07, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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.

Killing tasks sounds right; but the (small)  delay is not what I'm concerned
about. It is that the details pane can get out of sync with the selection
in the list, permanently, until I make another selection. Maybe it
wouldn't be so bad if the details pane had a heading telling me what
package it currently refers to. But it doesn't, and so the selection
in the list is the only way to infer it.

> > Also, the search field is not cleared (not sure it
> > should)
>
> I think it's a feature that it's not...

I concur

> > - 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.

Putting them in details tabs makes it impossible to "navigate deeper"
though, right ? Also, it means you need to always get these lists, which
may make things still slower.

What might help for the "tiny" part is to make the list/details vbox a
vpaned so that users can adjust the relative size.

> > - 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?

It just seems like unnatural restrictions. When the treeview is really
filled incrementally, I wouldn't worry so much about this taking a
long time to complete. The user can always cancel...

> > pk-update-viewer:
> > - pretty slow to start up
>
> To show the window, or to show the packages?

Slow to show the packages. But acutally,  now that I try again, it is not
as slow.

> > 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 :-)

I think part of the problem I have with them is that they are a) too big and
b) the spacing is not quite right. Compare to the nicely done progress bars
in epiphany.

Matthias