Andy Green wrote:
Rudolf Kastl wrote:
The most important thing about the design is to keep really
"usability" in mind.. the layout itsself is rather unimportant in case
of a repo... the important stuff is the repo itssself, the packages,
bugzilla, and a configuration how to. all of those are rather obvious
already on the page. just my opinion as a long time 3rd party repo
owner.
Yes...
Usability report on the usability report
----------------------------------------
If the guy has had to go to his web browser at all for general package
acquisition (other than perhaps to find a .repo file the once) then one
can say this represents some kind of failure of the packaging system. A
usability test on the site was meaningless in the context of packaging
systems since that's not how packages are meant to be generally acquired.
That goes double because picking up packages singly from a site like
that invites -- causes -- rpm Hell where you have to run around finding
all the dependencies by hand too. That is why a depsolver like yum
exists, to avoid all this crap.
Consider for example running a headless server as I and many people do
with Fedora. yum is very usable in this context. For local GUI use
there are things built on the relatively stable edifice of yum like
yumex. There is a yum service that can autoupdate unattended.
Hopefully you can see from this that while comments about usability can
be helpful, even ignoring the flamebait this one is fated to be blown
off because the terms of reference of it were useless to start with.
Quite possibly 99% of the downloads from Livna are happening without the
website being visited at all, and no doubt 99.9% of the package
downloads (isos aside) from the general Fedora repos.
If the guy wants to do Good in the world get him into a flamewar with
the Gnome 'usability experts' instead, they need the help more :-)
-Andy
I do agree that rpm is not the best things for installing software due
to dependencies but it would be nice to see a listing of what packages
are available on livna via a web browser. Yesterday I typed in yum
provides gdb and it took almost an hour to get the results. This is
only an example but a listing of packages would be nice.
It would give me the option to download the rpm or to enable livna and
then use yum.
Sometimes I am looking for something weird and I find an answer on
Google but it doesn't help if I cannot find the package. Livna may
have the package but I cannot do a simple search of the site to know.
How about a link from the package that opens a download page that
explains the benefits of Yum over straight rpm. Including links to
the various setup files and a howto to setup and user yum for noobs.
It improves usability and educates at the same time.
Just a suggestion.
