[packagekit] A new design update viewer

[David Zeuthen]

On Sat, 2008-01-05 at 11:36 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> David suggested a few new ways we could do the pk-update-viewer
> application. I spent last night drinking whisky with friends and mocking
> something up, so take the screenshots with a pinch of salt.

Mmm.. whisky.. looks good; some comments

> 00-no-updates shows the first screen when there are no updates. We
> probably need something more sane.
> 
> 01-updates shows how many of each type of update there is, which I think
> is useful. If there's just one low priority update then you could close
> it, but otherwise you could review then by clicking next. Do we need a
> summary page like this? Is it useful?
> 
> 02-review shows the review page, where we should add checkboxes so we
> can select what we want to download. If we make any partial update
> selection then we can hopefully call UpdatePackage with a list of
> package_id's in the not so distant future. Maybe.

(nitpick: I think it's s/bugfix/bug fix/. Maybe be useful to have
individual strings for the 0, 1 and N case too such as to get the
translations right for the none, single and multiple cases)

As for partial updates (e.g. select only a few updates), I suppose check
boxes would do. If that messes up the UI too much I suppose making the
user access it via a context menu a'la the OS X UI

 http://www.xvsxp.com/system/os_updates.php

but that seems hard to discover (and I've got no idea how to convey the
state without a checkbox; making it desensitive probably won't work).

The concept of ignored updates is interesting and potentially complex.
It's a bit similar to just unchecking updates but not quite - I think
the idea is that the UI will never prompt for that given package +
version again (and it needs additional UI like "Reset Ignored Updates").
So I'd skip that feature for now in PackageKit.

It does raise the question of what happens if you only do a partial
update with PackageKit. I think what should happen is that you will
still get the "there are updates available" icon in the notification
area and I think that's fine.

If people complain about this, for example if the really want to ignore
certain updates (I bet a small proportion of people might), maybe later
on you can add the "Ignore update" feature through a context menu (and
keep the list of ignored updates as a user preference, e.g. in the
desktop session space).

Anyway, just some thoughts.

> 03-transaction would show the transaction being carried out, with what
> is downloading and installing with the two progress bars like
> PkProgress. I didn't mock this up as it was getting late.

Sounds good to me... 

> Anyway, comments appreciated. Nothing is in git, as I wanted to get some
> feedback and sanity checking first.

One mockup that may be useful to iterate over is the last page; e.g.
what the user gets to see if either a) the transaction succeeded; or b)
the transaction failed. I guess the former is pretty self-evident and
the latter would more or less contain a GtkTextView (possibly with a
scrollbar) with a message containing the verbatim output from the
depsolver (e.g. yum)? 

(bonus points for allowing the user to copy from the error message text
view)

I'd also put text in the dialog explaining the user he can try playing
around with deselecting updates and give him a button back to the
initial screen.

Down the road I suppose such techno-babble can be improved upon but it
should be more than enough for now.

Anyway, just brainstorming. Keep up the good work!

      David