Re: Package List on Web Site

[Ludovic Courtès]

David Thompson <address@hidden> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> John Darrington <address@hidden> skribis:
>>
>>> In particular, I have noticed that http://gnu.org/s/guix/package-list.html 
>>> is now
>>> over 1.5 MB in size and is startign to take an unacceptably long time to 
>>> load (at
>>> least for me).
>>
>> I think it’s rendering that takes time, not transfer per se (unless you
>> have a very slow connection.)
>>
>> I would like it to use David’s guix-web JS code to add the search box
>> and multiple-page split.  I suspect this would address the rendering
>> time and usability issues.  But of course, that would need help from
>> someone knowledgeable...  :-)
>
> We could make a specialized application that did this, since guix-web
> will soon enough be concerned with authentication and other things that
> aren't needed here.  To do things the way guix-web does, it would
> require a Guile server component for the JSON API.

I was thinking of something simpler: statically generate
package-list.html (as we currently do, with list-packages.scm), but
instead of spitting out the HTML table directly, produce the JSON data
that guix-web’s browser-side code expects.

>> It would be ideal if this were done in a “progressive enhancement”
>> fashion, such that it can still be viewed in emacs-w3m.
>
> Yes, agreed.  This would be the hardest part, because guix-web is
> designed as a "single-page application", using JavaScript for all
> rendering.  I would be inclined to write this package list browser in
> the same fashion, because it results in much more elegant code than the
> jQuery soup we would otherwise be in.
>
> What should the non-JS fallback viewer look like?  Should we just
> display the full list as we do now?

I think so.

Ludo’.