This page is for discussing the PackagesDescriptionsReview CGI at http://zorglub.diwi.org/pkg-descriptions/

Todo

These ideas are still pending full specification and/or implementation.

General

I'm afraid that we will discover a few hundred or thousand reviews from now that the interface is too crude to scale to a task of this magnitude. I guess this is something to discuss on the mailing list in more detail. // ["era"]

In particular, I think something approximating "Severity" should be added to classify the change proposals. Many of them are very close to "wishlist" and might well not be worth submitting as bug reports (at least not at the same urgency as the cases where the description is obviously flawed in some way). I'll send something to the mailing list on this topic. (Done.)

Login

The button on the login page still has the label "Submit Query" (at least when viewed with Firefox)

Index

Could the names of the reviewers be indicated somehow? (Perhaps with an escape hatch if there are more than, say, three or four -- just list the first three and an ellipsis then, maybe?)

Section display

For the especially long sections (such as gnome, kde, x11) add a submission button every 20 elements or so? It can be tedious to scroll to the bottom of the page every few submissions in order to prevent the loss of your work. (Priority: Low)

Hmm, the button label "Validate" doesn't necessarily have the right ring ... How about just "Save"?

Package display

The button label still says "Submit query" (at least in Firefox)

Done

These ideas have been implemented already, and should probably be removed from this page at some point. They're useful to have around for a while, as a sort of NEWS for people who are revisiting after a few ... hours.

General

The buttons have the text "Submit Query", probably because the HTML doesn't contain an explicit button label. It's slighty misleading in some situations. Could the label be changed to something which makes sense? (FIXED 2005-08-03)

There is no feedback to indicate when an update has been accepted by the server. I find myself clicking on "Submit Query" two or three times just to be on the safe side. Still, it would be very easy to jump to a new page without saving by accident. Something like "last modified by xxxx on 2005-04-01 at 12:34:56 UTC" would at least indicate if your latest update was successful. (FIXED 2005-08-03)

Index

Could there be a link back to http://wiki.debian.net/?PackagesDescriptionsReview perhaps? In particular "Please tell what you intend to work on before actually starting, to avoid conflicts." would benefit from some sort of concrete instructions. (FIXED 2005-08-03)

"Section" or "category"? (FIXED 2005-08-03)

Section display

It would be nice to see how many packages are in a section (or in a quarter, as the case may be). (FIXED 2005-08-03)

The discplay tends to get pretty wide. At the same time, many fields are just a single label or a short piece of text. So, how about rearranging the display from the current:

  +--------------+-----------------+-----------------+--------+--------+--+
  || package name ||short description||long description ||review 1||review 2||st||
  +--------------+-----------------+-----------------+--------+--------+--+

to something like this:

  +--------------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+
  || package name || long        || review || review || status ||
  +--------------+ description || 1      || 2      ||        ||
  || short desc   ||             ||        ||        ||        ||
  +--------------+-------------+--------+--------+--------+

This would hopefully reduce the need to scroll back and forth. (FIXED 2005-08-03)

Package display

In sections which have been split into quarters, the "section" link nevertheless leads back to the full listing for the section in question. Probably the link should preserve the &quarter= argument of the referring link, if it has one. (FIXED 2005-08-03)