[packagekit] an honest look at gnome-packagekit

[Richard Hughes]

On Wed, 2008-05-07 at 23:03 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> 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.

Sure, being honest is important, I really don't mind you being harsh as
you've contributed so many great patches.

> While this sounds pretty grim, I think most of these complaints can be
> addressed with moderate changes:
> 
> - have a single status icon

Agreed.

> - do away with the left-click menu, just launch the update viewer

Agreed.

> - nuke the update viewer overview

Hmm, whilst I agree this isn't very useful with rawhide, with F9 it
looks rather pretty - unless the actions "refresh" and history are put
somewhere else then they'll just clutter the next screen. Maybe we could
put them in a menu or something.

> - display download and installation progress inside the package list

This doesn't work particularly well with the GpkClient shared GPG and
EULA code - it can be done, but why do you think this would be better?

> - make the update viewer single instance

Sure, I always wanted this, but GtkUnique/GUnique was never quite
finished. Yell if you can think of a way out of this.

> - always ask before installing a file

Well, in 0.2.0 if the user trusts the gpg key, and he's saved auth, then
he won't be prompted. He'll only be prompted when the gpg key is
untrusted. Or by ask, do you mean just a polite "Do you want to install
foo?" rather than authenticate?

Thanks,

Richard.