Re: [Synaptic-devel] Synaptic development

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

> > That's the main point of importance for the user, as I said before. We
> > use synaptic for a long time here, including our installer. I don't know
> > how you or your friends use synaptic, but I'm surprised to know that you
> > disagree with the opinion I've presented. If the only thing you do is to
> > open synaptic and click the upgrade button, you don't need *any*
> > interface at all.
> 
> Ohh, come on. Do you want to tell me that you do every upgrade manually,
> because the gui provides the feature? 

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean here.

> This is a non offensive question: Can you say me how often you have used
> this feature? No kidding, but I have never used it.
>
> I mainly use synaptic to install/remove packages and do a (half-)weekly
> dist-upgrade (I am on Debian Unstable).

Install/remove packages?! So what are we talking about here!? It looks
like we're talking about different features of synaptic. If you
install/remove packages in your system, you do use the toggle buttons.

> Yes, Synaptic is a gui frontend to apt and you are right: I could also
> do every action on the console. But this is not the purpose of a
> graphical frontend. :)

Please, let's keep the discussion serious.

> > Btw, I'm surprised to see *you* complaining about the size of the toggle
> > buttons. After all, *you* are the one that *increased* the size of
> > these buttons.
> 
> > There are at least tree points where you can see the "status" you
> > ask for:
> > 
> > - The Installed Version column, which looks very nice to me.
> > - The Common tab
> > - The Toggle buttons.
> 
> > Yep.. Michael told me about it. If you can't see the status of a
> > package, even after all these hints, do you really belive that an 'i'
> > will help!? :-)
> > 
> > OTOH, if you really belive that this additional hint will help, we
> > can include it for sure.
> 
> I just want one clear way and not two not always visible ones and one
> which requires an additional step of abstraction. Where is the problem?

All of them are quite visible here. Are you using vpaned? I personally
don't like it, and think it just hides a lot of stuff.

> The size of the buttons in hpaned are at the moment extended to the full
> width of the detail area. So the length of the label does not matter.

Yes, it does matter. I can't rollback the change and send you some
screenshots if you don't belive. But I'd be glad if you could perceive
that for yourself.

> The buttons can not be rearranged in one line since then we would again
> get the effect of resizing detail areas.
> 
> "Online Documentation" in hpaned had the the advantage that it was the
> longest label and also a static one. So the detail/control area would
> not resize. But I haven't considered that it is available on a few
> debian unstable installations only.

You're being fully targeted for debian, and that's not nice, since
Synaptic is meant to be a multi-distribution software. We don't have
"Online Documentation" (which is pretty long by itself, IMO) in
RPM systems.

> I did not want to degrade your work on synaptic. I never wanted to say,
> that I am the one with only true and best solution for this. But I had
> problems with the toogle button in the beginning and I know of other
> people that also had problems with them.

Let's concentrate on the problem then. What's the problem with the
toggle buttons? Where are the user complains you talk about?

> Have you read the user comments on footnotes? From what I can remember
> there were also some confusions about the toogle button stuff.

Nope. I have heard a lot of random comments from Conectiva users,
though. Most of them seem to be confused because they know nothing about
package updating or package systems. We must try to solve the problem
with these cases, but we must *not* hurt the general usage of the
software because of them. Otherwise these people won't like the software
after they *do* learn the general concepts.

> But perhaps we should consider to get more opinions on this. So I would
> suggest that we request for a review from the gnome usability team, when
> 0.46 is out.

That would be very nice. Please, ask them to review in a Debian system
and on an RPM based system.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net