Installed programs disappear from “What's new” and “Best rated” sections after restarting USC

Bug #1009967 reported by Michal Predotka
16
This bug affects 3 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
software-center (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Medium
Unassigned
Quantal
Fix Released
Medium
Unassigned
Raring
Fix Released
Medium
Unassigned

Bug Description

Ubuntu 12.04, USC 5.2.2.2

TEST CASE:
1. install quantal
2. install ubuntu-restricted-extas
3. open software-center and verify that ubuntu-restricted-extras is not in the top-rated list
4. install software-center from quantal-proposed
5. open software-center and verify that ubuntu-restricted-extras is now showing up in the top-rated list in the front page

Regression potential: low, its just a .menu-file change

I've installed an app which was in “What's new” category. Later on, after restarting USC, I noticed the app I installed disappeared from “What's new” list. I was confused because I wanted to review the app. Well, I thought, probably there was a problem with the app and it was removed from USC. Tough luck.
After few days I've installed another app from “What's new” list and again noticed the app is no longer there after restarting USC. This time I thought it can't be some coincidence. I've tested a little more and it looks like a bug in USC.

The problem also affects apps listed in “Best rated” and “Recommended” categories.

<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter#whats-new>: "On the home screen, the “What’s New” area should ... [be] excluding items that you have already installed. ... A separate “What’s New” screen ... [should list applications] regardless of whether they are installed."

<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter#top-rated>: "On the home screen, the “Top Rated” area should ... [list items] regardless of whether they are installed ... A separate “Top Rated” screen ... [should also list items] regardless of whether they are installed."

<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter/Recommendations#Displaying>: "The full set of recommendations should be, out of all software not currently installed, either the strongest 60 recommendations or all those with a confidence value of X or higher — whichever is fewer."

Related branches

Revision history for this message
Gary Lasker (gary-lasker) wrote :

Hello mmiicc, and thanks for your report! In fact, it is by design that the What's New list does not include installed items. The reason is that we don't feel it's useful information to show new items that are already installed. This section is there to show what new things are available that might be interesting to the person using Software Center.

Therefore, once you've installed one of these items, it is removed from this list.

Please just use the search feature to find the installed app and you can review it from there (and, btw, thank for doing reviews!!!).

I'll close this one as this is the specified behavior.

Thanks again for your help, both now and many times in the past!

Gary

Changed in software-center (Ubuntu):
status: New → Invalid
Revision history for this message
Michal Predotka (mpredotka) wrote :

Hi Gary, thanks for explanation. I tend to disagree with this behaviour though. Is this backed up by some user research data? And why installed programs disappear from “Best rated”? Is the installed app no longer best rated?
Regarding searching for istalled app to review it, I see it as adding another step if one wants to review an application.

Revision history for this message
Gary Lasker (gary-lasker) wrote :

Hi again mmiicc. I do appreciate your point, but indeed the design details for Software Center are subject to and informed by extensive user testing by the design team in Canonical. Here is the relevant part of the spec for the "What's New"

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter#A.2BIBw-What.2BIBk-s_New.2BIB0-

I noticed that the "Top Rated" section of the spec does *not* specify that only uninstalled apps should be shown, so it may well be that we should include them here. I will as the Software Center designer, Matthew Paul Thomas, for his thoughts about this.

@mpt, what think? Should we be showing installed apps in "Top Rated"? If so, please just note it here and feel free to reassign this to me.

Many thanks!
Gary

Changed in software-center (Ubuntu):
status: Invalid → Incomplete
importance: Undecided → Low
assignee: nobody → Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)
Revision history for this message
Michal Predotka (mpredotka) wrote :

Hi Gary, thanks for answering and pointing out the spec.

What I've noticed there:

“On the home screen, the “What’s New” area should use tiles to list, newest first, the applications that appeared most recently in any of your software channels, excluding items that you have already installed”

OK, it looks like USC works like this now, but further in the spec I see:

“Choosing “More” in the home screen area should navigate to a separate “What’s New” screen that uses a software tile view to list, newest first, the 60 applications that appeared most recently in any of your software sources, regardless of whether they are installed.”

According to that, I should see installed applications there but it's not the case at the moment in USC.
Also, I see only 20 (not 60) programs listed and in the list view (not tile view), but these are problems for another bug reports.

Anyway, thanks for not ignoring our bug reports and improving Ubuntu!

Revision history for this message
Gary Lasker (gary-lasker) wrote :

Hi mmiicc! Thanks a lot for your comments. Indeed, I had not noticed that part of the spec that you pointed out about the list view including installed items. And yes, the "tiles" are simply not yet implemented.

I would like to make a "Ubuntu Software Center Specification Gap" document that tries to capture all of the little details that don't match between the spec and the actual implementation. One of the difficulties here is that the spec is, in a way, an often-changing "roadmap" to a final destination that we are always trying to reach. The "tiles" instead of a list is a good example of this, in that we have simply not had the chance to do this development/implementation yet. But the smaller details such as the one you pointed out often become bug reports, and that's how we capture/track these sorts of gaps.

Thank you for your comment about not ignoring bug reports! It's very gratifying to hear this because we, as a team, always regret that we feel woefully under-responsive to reports and we are working hard to fix that. The challenge is that we are a very small team and the bug flow is quite large as Software Center is used constantly by many, many people. Bug triage is just part of our work as we also have our new development targets each cycle and, of course, that takes up a lot of our time.

That said, we consider responsive bug attention and triage extremely important because we appreciate and rely so heavily on the generous help that bug reporters bring to our project. So, if a reporter feels that we are ignoring their report, that is a very terrible thing to us, and we are committed to never let that happen.

If you ever feel that we are not responding in a timely manner to a bug you've submitted, please don't hesitate to simply drop me a note by email and let me know!!

Thank you again for all of your good work and your help!! It is most definitely appreciated!

My best regards,
Gary

Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

I've clarified the specification to make explicit that the "Top Rated" listing should be independent of what is installed. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter?action=diff&rev2=641&rev1=640>

To put it another way, the only listing that should change when you install something (besides Installed and History, of course) should be the front page subset of What's New. This is to maximize the number of new things you are exposed to. There's no point doing this on the standalone What's New screen, because all that does is reduce the number of items shown. And doing it on Top Rated would be misleading.

(BTW, please don't mark a bug report Incomplete unless it lacks requested information on how to reproduce it.)

Changed in software-center (Ubuntu):
assignee: Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) → nobody
importance: Low → Medium
status: Incomplete → Triaged
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

... And that leaves recommendations. If "Recommended For You" recommended things that you already had installed, I think people would consider it a bit silly. The recommendations spec already said that it shouldn't show installed items on the home screen, but I've now clarified it to say it shouldn't show installed things on the standalone screen either. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter/Recommendations?action=diff&rev2=15&rev1=13>

As for making a "specification gap" document, the big risk there is that it would get out of sync with the main specification. What I do in other projects, and what I've just done here, is to include a parenthesis after the relevant sentence(s) of the specification linking to the bug report. If you do that, it's easy for a tester reading the spec to see that a discrepancy is known. And when the bug gets fixed, anyone can remove the parenthesis at their leisure.

description: updated
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

This bug was fixed in the package software-center - 5.5.0

---------------
software-center (5.5.0) raring; urgency=low

  [ Andrew Hayzen ]
  * lp:~andrew-hayzen/software-center/accelerator-fix-lp744655:
    - fixes missing accelerator for a11y (LP: #744655)

software-center (5.4.1.3) UNRELEASED; urgency=low

  * lp:~mvo/software-center/fix-for-unusual-deb-lp1067634:
    - fix crash in deb packages without a description (LP: #1067634)
  * lp:~mvo/software-center/lp1009967:
    - fix the "top rated" display to match the spec by also showing
      the already installed items (LP: #1009967)
  * lp:~mvo/software-center/recoverable-errors-lp1051829:
    - send a custom duplicate signature so that the recoverable errors
      on transaction failures are broken down by error_code instead
      of all put into the same bucket (LP: #1051829)
 -- Michael Vogt <email address hidden> Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:56:26 +0100

Changed in software-center (Ubuntu):
status: Triaged → Fix Released
Michael Vogt (mvo)
description: updated
Changed in software-center (Ubuntu Quantal):
status: New → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Medium
Revision history for this message
Brian Murray (brian-murray) wrote : Please test proposed package

Hello Michal, or anyone else affected,

Accepted software-center into quantal-proposed. The package will build now and be available at http://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/software-center/5.4.1.3 in a few hours, and then in the -proposed repository.

Please help us by testing this new package. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Your feedback will aid us getting this update out to other Ubuntu users.

If this package fixes the bug for you, please add a comment to this bug, mentioning the version of the package you tested, and change the tag from verification-needed to verification-done. If it does not fix the bug for you, please add a comment stating that, and change the tag to verification-failed. In either case, details of your testing will help us make a better decision.

Further information regarding the verification process can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/PerformingSRUVerification . Thank you in advance!

Changed in software-center (Ubuntu Quantal):
status: Triaged → Fix Committed
tags: added: verification-needed
Revision history for this message
Michal Predotka (mpredotka) wrote :

Hi Brian,

Thanks for working on this issue. Unfortunately I'm not able to test this as I still use 12.04.

Revision history for this message
Sami Jaktholm (sjakthol) wrote :

Package in quantal-proposed fixes this bug for me.

tags: added: verification-done
removed: verification-needed
Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote : Update Released

The verification of this Stable Release Update has completed successfully and the package has now been released to -updates. Subsequently, the Ubuntu Stable Release Updates Team is being unsubscribed and will not receive messages about this bug report. In the event that you encounter a regression using the package from -updates please report a new bug using ubuntu-bug and tag the bug report regression-update so we can easily find any regresssions.

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

This bug was fixed in the package software-center - 5.4.1.3

---------------
software-center (5.4.1.3) quantal-proposed; urgency=low

  * lp:~mvo/software-center/fix-for-unusual-deb-lp1067634:
    - fix crash in deb packages without a description (LP: #1067634)
  * lp:~mvo/software-center/lp1009967:
    - fix the "top rated" display to match the spec by also showing
      the already installed items (LP: #1009967)
  * lp:~mvo/software-center/recoverable-errors-lp1051829:
    - send a custom duplicate signature so that the recoverable errors
      on transaction failures are broken down by error_code instead
      of all put into the same bucket (LP: #1051829)
  * lp:~mvo/software-center/5.4-fix-threading
    - Properly init threads now that the pygobject crash is fixed.
      This will fix the slow and unreliable submit of reviews
      (LP: #1083694)
 -- Michael Vogt <email address hidden> Wed, 28 Nov 2012 09:31:41 +0100

Changed in software-center (Ubuntu Quantal):
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
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