[packagekit] an honest look at gnome-packagekit

[Matthias Clasen]

Richard mentioned talking honestly about what we've achieved with the
0.2.0 release. I went ahead and collected some feedback from people
whose opinion in design questions I value. Since a good chunk of the
critisized UI is in part my own doing, I don't feel too bad about
being frank here.

- the UI gets it wrong on every turn (demands attention when it should
go away, stays  silent when it should notify me, etc)
- the 'updates available' icon is a meaningless star
- two status icons are confusing
- two menus on a status icon are bad, should just bring up the update
viewer on click
- update viewer window doesn't center properly
- you can get into situations with multiple update viewer windows open
at the same time
- the overview screen is useless, should directly go to the package list
- why "Refresh" - this is not a web page...
- having "History" available might be ok, but it shouldn't take an
important place on the initial screen
- the progress dialogs are too busy, and they change size
- when using the update viewer, the success screen keeps hanging
around forever, waiting for the user to dismiss it
- clicking on a link to a suse rpm in a web browser shouldn't start to
install it on a fedora system. It shouldn't start to install it
without asking for explicit confirmation, ever, period. (the reason
for this behaviour was a cached authorization from before we changed
it to disallow retaining authorizations)
- PK is too eager to spring into action when something changes (like
going online, or switching vts)
- the sleep warning is seriously annoying
- error messages are incomprehensible


While this sounds pretty grim, I think most of these complaints can be
addressed with moderate changes:

- have a single status icon
- do away with the left-click menu, just launch the update viewer
- nuke the update viewer overview
- display download and installation progress inside the package list
- make the update viewer single instance
- always ask before installing a file


Comments ?


Matthias