launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 24 March 2010 03:34, Michael Nelson <michael.nelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I've attached a few images to:
> https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/soyuz/+bug/496862
>
> for convenience, the screenshots are
> http://launchpadlibrarian.net/41732742/ppa-installable-binaries-wide.png
> http://launchpadlibrarian.net/41738415/ppa-installable-binaries-narrow.png

Thanks for working on this, and for posting screenshots.  I think it
is an important part of the ppa story.

I presume the "Uploading packages" bit is hidden if you're not in the
ppa owner team.

In the best case, the description field gives people good
human-written information about what's in this PPA and whether they
should use it.  So it should be at least as large and prominent as the
rest.

With the individual packages: your current approach makes the
Description field very prominent, but that's only going to be
interesting in some cases, and as you can see in this example it tends
to be a bit repetitive when there are binaries.  Not all Debian
packages have really user-oriented summaries.

If the package is an update or backport of one in Ubuntu, the
description is not so interesting compared to knowing what's new in
the changelog relative to what's in Ubuntu.   A bit like the way a
merge proposal shows you what revisions are new on this branch.

Similarly if the package is just not in Ubuntu at all that's
interesting.  And if the PPA is out of date, that's interesting too.

Would it be feasible to add a column showing what's in, say
$distrorelease-updates?  And have the version number link to a
changelog?

I'm not sure what "newer version available" would mean without
clicking it.  Available where?

> I want to continue to improve the usefulness of this page for users
> (and developers providing a PPA for users), for eg. bug 496458, and in
> the long term, I hope we can re-use the software centre meta-data to
> additionally provide installable applications when they are defined
> (with their screenshots etc.)

Also showing an html/rss view of the changes to packages in this ppa
would give an interesting view of activity.  A bit like what is shown
in the Update Manager.

hth

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>