Livna Usability Assessment Assessment

[Robin Laing]

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.