Re: New Fedora Packages Ready For Testing
On Sat, May 29, 2021 at 09:38:46PM -0500, Brendan Early wrote:
Hi all,
Fedora Packages Static is intended to replace the old Fedora
Packages app and is now available for testing at
https://packages.stg.fedoraproject.org. Any feedback would be
appreciated here or on Pagure at
https://pagure.io/fedora-packages-static.
Which pages is it supposed to replace? What is the relation to
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/?
The app is designed to function with the minimum amount of dynamic
server components needed. Pages are statically generated using a
Python script; the only dynamically generated page is the search
result page. Data is updated hourly. Search is handled externally by
an instance of Apache Solr. Clients do not need JS to use the app.
That sounds
good. I can confirm that the staging site seems snappy.
Thanks to Timothée Floure for the original version of Fedora
Packages Static and Kevin Fenzi for helping deploy the app on
OpenShift.
Some initial comments:
- the search results page seems … messy. Would it be possible to
group results by parent package? E.g.
https://packages.stg.fedoraproject.org/search?query=systemd returns
four pages of results, and a large number of entries is for
subpackages. Grouping them would make it easier to find other
interesting packages which are not part of the main package.
Maybe also sort the results somehow? I think the method that dnf
uses is pretty good: result are grouped by how they are matched:
"Name Exactly Matched", "Name & Summary Matched", "Name
Matched",
"Summary Matched". And within each group, results are sorted
alphabetically. This gives a "clean" look (also because subpackages
tend to be grouped together), gives the most relevant result first,
and still makes it easy to scan the list.
- A search result for a subpackage links to a page for that subpackage.
That's more confusing than useful:
https://packages.stg.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/systemd-networkd/ shows
the description for systemd-networkd, but all the information is actually
for systemd source package.
I think linking to a single page named after the source package
would be more useful to users. Subpackages should be listed on this
page. This is how Debian/Ubuntu to it. (It would also seem quite
natural if the results were grouped by source package, as suggested
above.) [EDIT: Oh, I see that this is done to an extent, the main
package has "Subpackages" section. Unfortunately this doesn't take
into account that different Fedora releases can have different sets
of subpackages. This information is very important to users too.]
- Related to the above: source package names are unique. Binary package
names are also unique for any given release of Fedora/EPEL/ELN/etc,
but not unique globally. There's an epel-only systemd-extras source package
which also builds systemd-networkd binary subpackage. But right
now the name is "occupied" by one of the subpackages, and no information
is shown for the other one. It would be even worse if there was an
epel-only systemd-networkd source package, because the main package
couldn't be shown at all.
Putting both binary and source packages under the same prefix
https://packages.stg.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/ cannot work.
- Are the descriptions takes from some old release? For systemd I see
"built from the 245.4-stable branch of systemd" while even f32 has
245.9 now.
- Whitespace in descriptions is squished. E.g.
https://packages.stg.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/systemd-swap/ looks very
strange. Generally package descriptions are supposed to be preformatted
text that fits in 80 columns. I don't think it should be wrapped at all.
'dnf info systemd-swap' looks good;
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/systemd-swap does a reasonable job,
except that it centers everything;
https://packages.stg.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/systemd-swap/ is hard to
read.
- There's "Recent Activity" at the bottom. For some packages this works,
but for others it only shows "Loading…". I see "TypeError: NetworkError
when attempting to fetch resource" shown for a fraction of a second.
- "SCM" links to a page that calls itself "fedora PACKAGE SOURCES"
and
that everybody seems to refer to as "dist-git" or "pagure" in
conversations. Maybe it would be better to call the link "sources"
or "dist-git source" or "package source"?
(And "FAF" links to "retrace.fedoraproject.org" page that calls
itself
"ABRT Analytics". I don't even know what to suggest here ;| .)
- https://packages.stg.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/systemd-swap/ has a number
of broken images in the "Recent Activity" part. Since that's generated
content, it's not so easy to see what's going on…
I hope that's useful feedback. Thanks for working on this!
Zbyszek