Community
Participate
Working Groups
Created attachment 103929 [details] Screenshot showing duplicate sites In attached screenshot from the P2 "Available Software" dialog, you see that the Repository "Target Management 3.0 Updates" is shown twice. One of them is the original master site on the Internet; the other one is a local mirror which I created with rsync and added as "Local Site". But which one is which? - I need to select each site in turn and open the Properties dialog to see. The Available Software Dialog should show the Repository Location in a tooltip when hovering over it; or, find some alternative way of displaying the location e.g. in separate pane that's sensitive to current selection, or in a separate column (not adviseable because of limited width).
Good idea, I've had this issue myself. Another possibility is a "description" area in the dialog that shows info about the selected (not checked) item.
yes, I've been requesting the "Description" field for other reasons in another bug today. Advantage of a separate "Description" field is that one can copy&paste contents, which you cannot do with a tooltip (but I'm not sure on what occasions you'd want to copy&paste the descriptions). Also, availability of a tooltip is not always obvious for the user. Disadvantage of a "Description" field is that it takes screen estate and is often so small that one needs to scroll (which was a major limitation for me in classic UM, the description field was always too small -- that's likely part of the reasons why many features today have much too brief, unusable desriptions which do not say more than the name of the feature already says. In TM, I've always tried to be more verbose with the description and convey useful information in as little space I could afford. That information would also include some text about required prerequisites or included features -- which will be even more valuable in P2 than in Classic UM, because now the dependency information is much more hidden during install than it was. In fact, having both tooltip and a (smaller) description field might also be an option, no?
>In fact, having both tooltip and a (smaller) description field might also be an >option, no? Agree. I've had this debate in my own head as well. When I first implemented the installed and available features dialog, I used tooltips but this was back when we had no or ugly metadata and it was rather annoying. I just never had time to revisit the issue. The hooks are in the viewers to supply an element property that should be shown as the tooltip. It's just a matter of deciding what's important to show there.
I'd clearly vote for "Location" on Repositories, and "Description" on IU's.
The description field for IU's is implemented in M3, still need to look at tooltips and supplying repo description info in the description field. This will be done in M4 along with other "available view" enhancements.
This is pushed to M5, we are looking at a lot of other repo presentation issues there, along with affordances in the available view.
I think we can mark this bug as FIXED in I20090106, although elements of the problem have been fixed since M3. The original problem was that a local mirror and a remote repo using the same name were indistinguishable in the Available Software List. I renamed the bug to state the problem rather than propose a solution, since the solution doesn't apply anymore. - In I20090106, we no longer show software grouped by site, so you won't see repos in this list, and there will be no need to distinguish them by location or any other information - we are already showing an IU's description info on this page (as also suggested in this bug) - the sites are now shown in the "Available Software Site" preferences. Both the name and location are shown. If the repo has a description, it is shown at the bottom. It should be easier to distinguish the different locations now, and you can also sort the repos by name or location - it is now possible to filter the available software list by repository and in this case the location is shown Given all of these enhancements, I think we've solved the original problem.
