Usability: provide a select/deselect all option

[Daniel O'Connor]

Proposal:
Add a select/deselect control to the main package interface. Existing behavior, all packages selected, should be maintained.

Reasoning:
I'd rather install 15 packages separately if they are substantial downloads (more than 5 minutes) than wait for them to all go at once. In fact, I'd often want to only install 3 or 4 and ignore others until later.

If it had a 'select all/select none' toggle, I could easily clear the default select all, and life would be better.

Examples:
 * TortoiseSVN's commit dialog is the perfect example of this behaviour

[Daniel O'Connor (daniel-oconnor)]

To clarify, since lodging this I've discovered the context menu which contains the functionality. I had to look at the source code itself before I realized it existed.

I don't think the context menu options are suitably clear enough - they suggest direct manipulation of an individual entry rather than a mass action. They are also hard to discover.

Having a more visible control would solve this problem, and eliminate the need for the entire right click menu.

[Daniel O'Connor (daniel-oconnor)]

The discoverability of this functionality is still terrible; the bug report is about the usability - I just don't have an edit button to make the title/report more accurate.

[Michele Mangili (mangilimic)]

Hello Daniel!

Thank you for reporting this issue and helping to make Ubuntu better! We have recently moved your bug report from the distribution "update-manager" to the Ubuntu package "update-manager", because this is the correct place to report issues about this program. I apologize for this delay in reading your report.

At the same time I think that your request is detailed enough so that a developer of update-manager can start working on this issue. However I don't know if this feature will be implemented in the next versions since I'm just triaging bug report and I'm not a developer.

[Robert Roth (evfool)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug #329441, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.
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