On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas <m...@canonical.com>wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Hi Evan > > Evan wrote on 31/03/09 23:19: > > > > While apt, synaptic, update-manager, and gnome-app-install all do > > decent jobs of providing front-ends for package management, there are > > a few issues and common feature requests which bear taking a look at. > > This is a strawman, so feel free to rip it apart as necessary. > > In Canonical's Design and User Experience team we've just (this morning) > started tackling the issue of package management in general, so your > message is excellently timed. > 100% coincidence. Honest. > > PolicyKit > > Synaptic runs fully as root. Unless there is a specific reason not to, > > should it not be migrated to PolicyKit? > > > > Queuing > > The ability to start an install process, and then decide to queue > > another app to install / update after the first is finished. > > > > Parallelism > > Starting the install process in parallel with the download process as > > soon as the first packages are finished downloading. (I got this idea > > from brainstorm, but I can no longer find the relevant idea.) > > All good ideas. I've added them to > <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AppCenter#Desired%20attributes>. Thank you. I didn't know it had a wiki blueprint already. > I'm not sure what we ought to be changing or replacing, but I would > > think we want to write a replacement for apt as the backend, and a > > replacement for whatever provides the progress-bar in the GUI? > > We'd need to get into a lot more design detail before deciding anything > as fundamental as whether apt needs replacing. > Agreed. > The front end would display two progress bars, one for download and one > > for installation. > > Hopefully that isn't necessary. I shouldn't see two progress bars for > something that, from my point of view, is a single task. > I'm not so sure. If they are going to be happening in parallel, then they will have different % complete values. You could combine them, but I think that would jump around enough to be confusing. As a note, I see two separate progress bars in Windows app installers all the time. For all I know this could be their usability issue, and not something to emulate, but I'm just saying that it is done. > > It would also display a queue of what's to come > > (perhaps with little Xs to cancel something if you change your mind). > > It would be a seperate window in it's own right, > > It wouldn't be necessary to put the queue in a separate window. It could > be a viewable item in the main window, as it is in Miro for example. I hadn't even considered this, but it does make sense, especially if (as the blueprint suggests) there will be only one GUI for all four of the current ones, and thus no separate command sources to consider. If this becomes the case, I would ask for the ability to hide all but the install progress so that it doesn't take up as much screen space. On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 2:24 PM, Martin Olsson <mn...@minimum.se> wrote: > One gigantic improvement would be downloading package deltas > instead of whole .DEB files. I don't think this is necessarily that > hard to do in a reliable fashion. I assume you already thought > about that and it might be out of Ubuntu's scope (i.e. better > developed separately and then integrated into Ubuntu once it's > stable). > AFAIK this idea has been kicking around for years but nobody has ever really gotten around to it. I agree that it is a bit out of scope (especially for Karmic), but I would really like to see this implemented at some point. I heard a rumour that upstream (debian) was looking at it, but nothing since. Can anybody fill in a few more details here? Another, much much simpler, feature request I have been thinking > about is to make installing updates faster by letting the download > and install parts run in parallel. With the current code I first > see my network capacity being maxed out with CPU and HDD activity > at nearly zero, then network activity stops and the machine starts > to tax the CPU and harddrive. Once a package plus it's dependencies > are downloaded, I don't see why that package cannot be allowed to > start it's installation / upgrade while the rest of the packages > are still being downloaded. > This is what I meant by "Paralellism" in my original post. Evan
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