[Aptitude-devel] Another idea on "tasks"

[Daniel Burrows]

  I had another notion today about how to represent tasks, background
jobs and so on for the user.  I don't know how much I like it, but it
seems like an interesting direction to think on.

  Basically, there are a couple problems with using notifications for
showing the status of background jobs:

  (1) Notifications are very "transient": easy to close by accident,
      and once they're gone you can never find them again.
  (2) Notifications don't scream "look at me, I am the next step of
      your job".
  (3) Notifications massively clutter up the display once there are
      more than 2-3 of them.

  I have an idea that could solve all of these, except maybe (2).
Instead of using notifications to show what's going on in background
tasks, we could use a list-view.

+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Jobs:                                                           |
|   (list of active jobs here)                                    |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Dashboard \  Packages \                                         |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                 |
|                                                                 |
|                                                                 |
|                                                                 |
|                                                                 |
|                                                                 |
|                                                                 |
|                                                                 |
|                                                                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+

  I don't know if this really solves the problem of getting the user's
attention, but it does solve the other two problems:

  (a) Instead of a "close" button, jobs would have a "cancel" button,
      perhaps implemented as a "hyperlink"?  When the button was
      pressed, the job might prompt the user (as the current
      notifications sometimes do), and it would then be changed to
      a "canceled" state.

      This makes it easier to see what jobs you ran in the past.  You
      could maybe even restart a cancelled job, although we'd have to
      think carefully about what that meant.

  (b) Obviously, list views scroll, so the clutter will be more
      manageable.  (if history is stored across sessions, some more
      organization -- e.g., grouping by date -- will be useful someday)


  Candidates for this "job" list would be anything with a progress bar:
downloads, dpkg runs, dependency resolver sessions, etc.

  Daniel