some listings can be sorted by invisible quantities

[Michael Hudson-Doyle]

My fix to bug 148226 leaves us in the undesirable situation of being able to sort branch listings on a quantities that are not present in the listing (registrant name, date created). We should work out how bad this is and what to do about it.

Bug listings have a similar issue.

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

Hey Michael,

Is this still an issue? If so, it'd be good if you could put in the usual "expected, observe, reproduce" text.

jml

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

Yes, it's still an issue.

Because it's a UI thing, it's a bit woolly and hard to test precisely for, but here's an attempt:

Try to work out what the branches are sorted by here by just looking at the table: https://code.edge.launchpad.net/loggerhead/+branches?field.lifecycle=CURRENT&field.lifecycle-empty-marker=1&field.sort_by=newest+first&field.sort_by-empty-marker=1

I don't know how severe a problem this is or how to solve it, sadly -- there are more useful fields to sort on than would fit in even the widest browser window.

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

OK. For the time being I'll mark it as Low. Suggested next actions:
  * talk to mpt or some other UI person, get their opinion
  * put together a few different prototype solutions and then get other Launchpadders to review them. (set-based design)

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

It doesn't seem like it would ever be useful to sort by last commit number. Therefore "Last Commit" doesn't need to be a column; it could instead be a secondary row for each result. This would also give you (almost) the entire row to display the commit message. That in turn would would mean you probably wouldn't need the super-tooltips for the commit messages (which, while a work of art, do get in the way a bit).

With that column removed, you could add a Registrant column, and that would give you columns for every sort option currently in the menu, other than "by most interesting" (which BTW probably should be "most interesting first").

[Graham Binns (gmb)]

Can anyone provide an instance of this happening in Launchpad Bugs? We've got a bug task hanging around here for it...

[Eleanor Berger (intellectronica)]

> Can anyone provide an instance of this happening in Launchpad Bugs?

All options except for status and importance in the advanced bug search