[packagekit] Simpler search

[Robin Norwood]

On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:31:44 +0000
Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On Wed, 2008-02-13 at 20:28 +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> > On Feb 13, 2008 8:24 PM, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2008-02-13 at 14:11 -0500, Robin Norwood wrote:
> > > > What do you think about combining the name/description search
> > > > options in the pk-application UI?  It seems unlikely that the
> > > > user really cares whether the term he is searching for matches
> > > > the name or the description.  Can we combine those two options,
> > > > or have a default search option that searches by name, then
> > > > description?
> > >
> > > Well, I don't think we should combine the search in the backend
> > > (i.e. 2 methods into 1) as some clients may just want a simple
> > > search and not want the extended search as it may require
> > > downloading metadata.
> > >
> > > It might be a good idea to default to a "both" search option in
> > > the UI that does a simple search then a detailed search on the
> > > same query.
> > 
> > >From a usability POV these should really be one.
> 
> I'm not so sure (but up for a lively debate :-) - I often _know_ the
> package name of something I want to install, for instance
> "kpowersave".
> 
> Sometimes I'm just searching for "gokart" and want deeper searching to
> find supertuxkart.

But sometimes the package name is less than obvious, unfortunately.
openoffice.org comes to mind, and I know there are others I've
personally dealt with using yum that were frustrating me.

I think the yum commandline 'yum search' does both names and
descriptions now.  Could we do it in two passes?

ie, search by name, and the results start popping up in the UI.  If you
see what you want, click, and the search is canceled.  Otherwise, wait
a few more seconds and a description search is fired off after the name
search is done.  All this happens in the background, and should be
reasonably fast, though.

-RN

-- 
Robin Norwood
Red Hat, Inc.

"The Sage does nothing, yet nothing remains undone."
-Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching