Looking at Package Management for Karmic or Karmic+1

[Martin Olsson]

Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> We have not made any decisions about whether this program would be based
> on PackageKit, Add/Remove Applications, Synaptic, or something else, or
> written from scratch. We should first design what it will do and how it
> will behave, then work out how to implement it.

As you now doubt have heard numerous times already, if we could ever get to a
consistent interface between RPM / DEB based distros that would be a gigantic
win for Linux overall. For some extent I therefore think Canonical should have at
least a small packagekit bias, should all the available options be _roughly_ equivalent.


I also have some feedback on the AppCenter spec (maybe there is something here you'd
want to note even though I hope you will measure all such things in a proper UX study).

The "new updates available" screen doesn't tell the user which ones are critical/security
updates. While the file size of the update is nice to know, it's probably more important
to have some icon that marks it as "really important". Windows update seems to have both
but they emphasize the "update importance" and just write out the filesize as a "FYI".

Popularity stats should not be skewed by "default installs" so I don't think it should be based
straight on popcon (maybe it should be weighted against some list of default installed apps
or something). Right now it looks like gnome games is more popular than for example
freeciv/openarena/chromium which I have a hard time believing. Maybe more people play
gnome games (because they are installed by default) but if I go into AppCenter looking
for a cool new game that's very "popular", I'm probably looking for something else.

I think the terms "Ubuntu Software" and "Partner Software" is a bit unclear. It sounds
like the partner software is not Ubuntu software? I guess you are referring to Canonical
Maintained apps but I don't have a better name for it.

Why is "Fonts" it's own top-level item next to "Ubuntu Software"?

I see that the "Description" field for each update is working properly in your mockup.
I really hope that you will list that as a explicitly feature and make sure it "just works".
Today update-manager has a feature where it shows a description for each update but
that functionality very often just doesn't work. One could argue that update-manager is
working properly and that it's the underlying infrastructure that doesn't work as it
should (for instance "aptitude changelog BLAH" very often doesn't work either) but the
end user doesn't care which app is broken and therefore I hope you will strech outside
of this new AppCenter UI and fix the _experience_ that is actually delivered to the end user.


		Martin