launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Michael Nelson <michael.nelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 4:26 AM, Tim Penhey <tim.penhey@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:01:49 Michael Nelson wrote:
>> https://dev.launchpad.net/BuildBranchToArchiveUI
>
> Hi Michael,
>
> Firstly I think you have done an awesome job with the UI mock-ups.  I talked
> with Michael Hudson today, and here is the summary of what came up. I'm not
> expecting you to answer all of these, but to give us notes to work from.

Thanks Tim. If you were looking today then what you saw is an
in-progress re-design of the mockups. The initial ones that I did last
week were on the assumption that we had to work with the current
recipe infrastructure (in bzr builder). After chatting with James and
Jono, we decided to have a go at a UI that makes no assumptions about
current recipes in bzr builder, but I'm still working with James and a
few others to make sure that the direction we're heading is both the
best user experience and actually feasible. Jonathan will then be
organising some user testing once the mockups have settled.

So, with that in mind...

>
>
> We agreed that it is important to focus on the initial workflow of creating a
> new daily build of a branch into a PPA.
>
> We realised that we are missing the schedule information for the recipe itself
> in order to support daily builds properly.
>
> We are missing any form of UI mock-ups for the branch page itself.

Yes, so far I've just concentrated on the main interaction from the
branch page - as we need to get that right and ensure that it's
feasible before going ahead with the rest (IMO).

>
> What changes on the branch page when a new build has been requested?

At the moment on the Use-case at:
https://dev.launchpad.net/BuildBranchToArchiveUI/UseCaseManualBuild
we've got:

5. The overlay disappears and the branch page is updated with a
"Recent builds" portlet listing the new build and its status, linking
to (somewhere appropriate within) the PPA.

(I'll add it that point to the other examples on that page).

>
> How are we going to show builds in progress?

SPRBuilds will be shown in a similar way to binary builds currently in
a PPA, like:

https://edge.launchpad.net/~michael.nelson/+archive/pocketsphinx/+build/1401973

>
> What if the user wants to remove a daily build?  Or just disable it?

Yes, this is a good question. We're not yet sure where this
information will be accessed from if it's not part of the recipe.
There's already a note about this at:
https://dev.launchpad.net/BuildBranchToArchiveUI/UseCaseManualBuild#Unresolved%20questions

>
> Is it really feasible to share recipes?  When wanting to build into a PPA,
> what are we really accomplishing by choosing someone else's recipe?

It all depends on what the recipe stores... as they are currently
implemented sharing wouldn't be so easy from a user perspective. But
(and here's the hidden assumption of the current mockup) if a recipe
didn't store the base branch itself, but instead was applied to a
branch, then there are loads of options for re-usability. It's
probably not too clear from the mockups - maybe we can organise a call
at some point to actually talk through them (probably hard with
time-zones).

>
> We are likely to have multiple recipes for each branch that is being built
> daily as we are going to target multiple distroseries.  Am I right on this
> assumption?

So the current mockups have a recipe identifying its targeted
distroseries, but when building a recipe, the user can choose to
override this and select other/multiple distroseries. But that
information wouldn't be on the reusable recipe itself (that was one of
the points that Aaron emphasised - that we need to separate out the
re-usable info from the build-time decisions to maximise reusability).

>
> We will want some general recipe oriented views later, but what we have is a
> good start.

Thanks for the feedback!

>
> Tim
>