Livna Usability Assessment Assessment

[Andy Green]

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

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