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Looking at the Ganymede site through Help > Software Updates... I can see a nicely categorized tree of Features, but what to do if I need more information about a particular feature? For instance, what is the difference between "C/C++ Development Platform" and "C/C++ Development Tools"? The difference is that Tools == Platform + GNU build and debug support, but who knows that? Only the insiders. Classic UM had a reading pane below the tree of features, which always desplayed the "Description" of each feature as it was selected. I've used that a lot in order to get more information about the stuff that's avaialble, and in order to decide what to select. As another example, who knows the difference between "BIRT DOC" and "BIRT Report Designer Plugins" ? (Well that's a bad example since BIRT is setting the description of both features to the same value... hm....) I admit that there are cases where "description" is not more verbose or informative than the feature name, but in other cases it is. In P2, I need to select the feature, and press the "Properties" button in order to read descriptions. Not at all nice for reviewing and comparing descriptions of multiple features. I therefore request either (a) a reading pane for feature descriptions, like classic UM had, or (b) a tooltip hover with the description when hovering over an item.
Agree. In additional to the important practical issues of having sufficient information to make decisions on what to load, ideally it'd be a block of HTML so that it can be nicely presented, give links to the providing company/project, allow opportunity for branding, etc.
Currently the metadata for a description is plain text. I'd like to keep this bug focused on "show the description on the main page" and discuss metadata separately. You could open a bug to change the metadata to richer formatting, or you could add comments to bug #204473 as that touches on branding icons.
ok yes you're right, I logged bug #240708 and made this block it (since must have a place to show the data first!).
The description is now shown in the "Details" group in both the installation info dialog and the "install new software" wizard. note these are new workflows per bug #236740 (and others). While I was doing that, I made sure the new dialogs had a description field. fixed in HEAD >20081007
Verified in WinXP, Build id: I20081029-0100
