Package search and others
YaST ideas and research
We moved the summer of code ideas, and other projects to the YaST/Research page. We would like to find all the experiments that are lying around in the tmp and experimental branches and put them together in that page so previous attempts and knowledge is not lost.
Installation Branding
Some information on branding the installation is available on YaST/Tips#Brandingtheinstallation.
Package groups
The first thing that caught my attention in the rpm world was package groups. It is a 4 deep level tree which has become pretty useless with time. They are also not consistent across rpm distributions. I agree that they are interesting metadata (because they contain keywords), but nothing you want to display in a user interface.
So I started to ask people around. Do you use the groups tree?. “YES” was the first reply. I was surprised. Were my initial guesses wrong?. “I use it to select the zzzAll group, which is the only way to select all packages”. Interesting point, any effort to change this should take that into account.
Luckily all the answers were the same. The famous “zzzAll” group was the only reason why people used that filter.
So when looking for a way to make that screen more easy to the eyes, PackageKit groups seemed like the way to go, as they are already in use in some applications.
That is how package groups looked like before:
After matching the rpm groups to PackageKit groups, this is the result. Easy.
Notice that “All packages” is still there. Also there is a recommended and suggested groups. The interesting thing is, that if you look at other applications, like Gnome PackageKit install, which is a braindead application (no features) compared to YaST, but still, now they look pretty consistent with each other:
Before you cry for your old 4 level deep tree, you can still reach the groups via search. Search will look into the groups field and also the generated keywords in the metadata (tags).
Package search
Now uses the sat solver APIs to query the solv files, which is much faster and we have transparent access to more attributes.
Tags: packagemanagement, suse, yast, zypp
April 28th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Excellent. Thank you. The mess that the old tree-view had become has bothered me for long time. What kind of user would start looking for his spreadsheet software under ‘productiviy’?
April 28th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
I used to use the zzzAll group, also. Recently, I noticed under the Packages drop down menu, All Packages -> Update if newer version available.
Unless I am missing something, this seems to produce the same results as using the zzzAll group. It is faster to select, too.
April 29th, 2008 at 2:56 am
Well, the zzzAll group is still there in the group list, just above “Recommended Packages”, so it stays the same, only with a normal name (zzz?). You can see it in the screenshot.
May 1st, 2008 at 5:17 pm
In this new interface, what is the difference between Patterns and Package groups? The groups view was exactly for those who wanted to see packages in the tree while those who wanted to use a simpler interface, used the patterns, didn’t they?
Even if one can search in the groups field, the tree view is much easier to review, and we do not necessarily know the exact name of the group to search for. I like to browse through all the groups before installation selecting all the apps I might want to use - I can’t do this I cant see all the available categories or if there are hundreds of packages in each category.