[Soc-coordination] Applying for improving Aptitude packages query utilities

[Daniel Burrows]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 06:24:15AM +0800, sha liu <sandyleo26 at gmail.com> was heard to say:
> Thanks Arthur and Daniel, I think i kind of understand "what should one
> achieve in this idea" by asking you guys quesstions and try the
> aptitude-gtk. This is what i figured out:
> There's a search dialog(pop-up or tab, whatever) in which there're some
> basic entries like "name", "version", "description", "website" etc.
> And there may be a "advanced" button which trigger another dialog in which
> more entries will appear like "depend", "maintainer" etc. But most
> importantly, there're also some combo box entries for regular expressions
> which ease the user who want to use them. And when the result comes out,
> these match expression will be highlighted.

  That sounds about right.  I'm currently expecting highlighting to be a
separate project from the search expression editor, because there's no
technical relationship between them and I'd rather end up with one of
the two options implemented very well, and maybe reimplemented better
after we get user feedback on the first version, than get a half-baked
version of both of them.  (I'm perfectly capable of writing half-baked
code all on my own. ;-) )

  BTW, my lame ASCII-art rendering of one way of doing the popup dialog
is here:

http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/aptitude-devel/2008-December/001139.html

  I have no particular attachment to this; feel free to design something
better.  I mention it only to show the type of thing I'm thinking of.
My comment at the top of that email disagreeing with Arthur is outdated,
btw.

> For the current(mine is 0.5.1) results display window, i think the icon
> before every package are all the same(green). However, it's hard to
> represent every package with their own characteristic icon, we can assign
> icon based on their catagory, like admin, lib, devel etc.

  The icon represents the status of the package.  e.g., if you have a
package that's not installed there won't be a green dot.  There are some
other icons that show up in less common circumstances.  If you hover the
mouse over the icon, you'll see a brief description of it.

  At a first glance, I'm not very enthusiastic about the idea of trying
to assign icons based on package "categories"; it seems like it would be
very hard to design icons that visually represent categories, and it
would be hard for the user to remember them.  I'd rather just add
sections to the list as text (and now that we have more sections, they
might be halfway useful again).

> And i have a very immature idea that we can add button label with "google
> it" etc, if we got conflictions or broken packages or something not
> desirable after we get some actions on the pending list. The format and the
> content we send to google is still to be considered. however the message
> generated by aptitude-gtk can be copy-and-past so even user don't click the
> google button , he can paste the message around in forum and ask for help.

  That sounds like hard AI research -- probably out of scope for a
three-month coding project!  Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, though; a
concrete example of what you mean would help explain your idea.

  Daniel