launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 26 March 2010 19:47, Michael Nelson <michael.nelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 12:51 AM, Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>> 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.
>
> Yes, that would be a great improvement (the project page does this
> really well). Created
> https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/soyuz/+bug/547031 (I'll aim to land it
> in the same pipe of branches).
>
>>
>> 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.
>
> I wasn't sure if that was just this pocketsphinx package that I did.
> I'll check a few other PPAs on df. Here's a more realistic example:
>
> http://launchpadlibrarian.net/42034558/fta-ppa-with-installables.png
>
> As you can see, the repetition is still there (due to the way binaries
> are packaged), but it's not quite as bad as my own example.
>
>>  Not all Debian
>> packages have really user-oriented summaries.
>
> Yeah. I guess my question is, is it the best we have and still worth
> displaying? Or do you mean it should only be displayed when the user
> wants more info (ie. expanding the row?).

I think we should still display it and just make the PPA description
more prominent: that, if anything, should be written specifically for
the audience of people thinking about using this PPA.

>> 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.
>
> Yes, this is you bug 496458 right? I'm not sure that we can
> realistically (performance-wise) do any better than showing the last
> changelog entry (as the current source packages do). I'm not sure how
> we could efficiently do a delta of the changelog relative to ubuntu,
> but I'll look into it.

Right, this is not necessarily urgent but might be nice to do
eventually.  I do think people looking at a PPA will want to know
reliably which of the following subjective categories it falls into:

 * this has something slightly ahead of Ubuntu (like a fix for a bug
that will be uploaded after testing)
 * this has something way ahead of Ubuntu (a new major release)
 * this has something that's not packaged in Ubuntu at all
 * this intentionally has something older than Ubuntu (does this case
really matter?)
 * this PPA is at the moment behind Ubuntu, perhaps because it's
neglected or it has nothing interesting to add

and for different packages it might be different answers, but probably
generally just one.

Why would it matter?

If the PPA is neglected/stale; that's interesting to start with.

If it's installing things that aren't in Ubuntu at all, that probably
tells you you can safely install them and they won't conflict or
fight.  Obviously it's quite technically possible that the packages
will, but if it's a new application which I suspect is the common
case, perhaps it's safe.

I guess these categories go towards giving you an idea of the likely
risk and likely reward of adding the PPA.

At least I think these are what I want to know when I look at it.  I
may be atypical.

At any rate showing a debian/changelog diff is only going to help a
fairly nerdy type of user, but thinking about the general problem may
help more people.

>> Similarly if the package is just not in Ubuntu at all that's
>> interesting.
>
> Why is this interesting to a user (ie. it won't be installed by adding
> the PPA unless they explicitly install it)? And knowing you'll have a
> good reason, how do you see that being presented? (An small icon
> representing something new, with relevant text on mouse-over - or
> something more prominent?)
>
>> And if the PPA is out of date, that's interesting too.
>
> See below, I think this is what the "newer version" is for (ie. the
> version of the package in the PPA is older than the version in the
> Distroseries.)
>
>>
>> Would it be feasible to add a column showing what's in, say
>> $distrorelease-updates?  And have the version number link to a
>> changelog?
>
> Yes, that'd certainly be possible. Ah right, as this would enable the
> user to see the difference between the changelogs when they want to?
> (So currently we only link to a *newer* version in the distroseries,
> but you're saying it would also be helpful to link to the changelog of
> the current distroseries version). This would also communicate whether
> the package is not in Ubuntu at all as you suggested above.

Right, and that would avoid the implementation issue of doing a diff
between them on demand.  (otoh if you have both of them in the
librarian maybe it's not that hard to just do a diff in a web
request?)

>> I'm not sure what "newer version available" would mean without
>> clicking it.  Available where?
>
> I think it's what you mentioned above, it's showing that the PPA is
> out of date and that there is a newer version available in the
> corresponding Ubuntu distro series. Which implies that we should
> update the note to include the distroseries display name? "Newer
> version available in Ubuntu 10.04", or update this info completely and
> present it in its own column as you've suggested above.

That would be good; it will make more of those different cases clear.

>>> 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.
>
> You might want to add your weight with a comment to bug 207333 :)
>
> Thanks Martin for the considerable thought and feedback!

Thanks for listening.

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