[Slapt-get-devel] usability study of gslapt

Jason Woodward woodwardj at jaos.org
Mon Feb 28 23:04:37 EST 2005


Hi Sriram,

> hi jaos and others
>  i did not get a chance to test the alpha version extensively;
> however, here is a brief observation from the  usability  perspective;

I'll let you revise your observations after you get a chance to check out cvs current.

Make sure to get started you have the current cvs libslapt as well.  Some changes are made in
concert with both projects.

> 1. the menus are redundant; [ which is both good and bad ]
>    usually menus provide the complete functionality; but icons provide
> only the most frequently used;  for a small application like gslapt, 
> it is better to *aim for*  no menus;

Interesting idea.

> 3. may i suggest that description is next in importance to name; so it
> be moved next to the name of package;

Already happened in cvs current.

> 4. facility to upgrade only the selected package(s)

That has been there from the beginning.  cvs current makes it more apparent by changing the
text label on the buttons.

> 5. would be great if a view of  packages in  groups is provided along
> with a list;

yes, i've thought of this as well.

> 6.  the location and  version info are provided twice ; [ both good and bad]
> 7. location is with reference to "." but it is not clear that it
> refers to  soem other directory and not the current directory where
> gslapt was launched from ;

For installed packages, the location field parsed out of the /var/log/packages/ entry contains
this information as well.  It may be ideal to strip this out.  However, this is low priority.


The location relationship breaks down like this:

SOURCE + "/"* + LOCATION + "/"* + PACKAGE
*optional

This is not obvious so it makes me question the utility of the LOCATION field altogether.

> 9. most important!! :)  ; these are just my opinions!! im not a guru
> of anything [ except maybe  c/c++]  so kindly consider these my
> observations and a seed for discussion rather than flame;  to me this
> looks like a gui-fication of slapt get;
> instead if we started from scratch to develop a package managemetn
> tool with gui only , and happen to use slapt-get for the back end then
> im sure we will end up with a different design;

The initial work was exactly as you describe.  Some effort has already gone into moving away
from this idea.

> 10 . also i hope to be able to get familiar with the code and make
> some contributions of my own; in which case, i would really appreciate
> if the work is broken into well defined tasks so that i [ or people
> like me ] can sign up and commit code ;

That would be appreciated.



take care,
jason

--
Jason Woodward
woodwardj at jaos.org

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