Re: [Synaptic-devel] Synaptic development

[Sebastian Heinlein]

Am Mi, den 12.11.2003 schrieb Gustavo Niemeyer um 15:00:

Hi Gustavo,

> 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? 

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).

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. :)

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Regards,

Sebastian