Comment 7 for bug 432879

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

<mvo> mpt_: that is possible and should not cause too much grief, but it will require some magic to ensure that its always consistent depending with the running transcations and the ones that got canceled in between etc

So let's assume we can show live information, on a package screen, about which other packages will need to be installed for a given package.

Now, you've figured out two steps of the gap between your mockups (and what PackageKit shows) and solving your original problem: (1) the person needs to know what a dependency is, and (2) the Store needs to know which of the packages have already been downloaded. But there's one more important step missing: (3) the actual amount of disk space involved! It's all very well listing 20 dependencies, but if they're only 100 KB each that doesn't matter; whereas if there's only one dependency but it's 850 MB, that might matter a bit more. So showing the list of dependencies doesn't actually solve the problem, unless you're the sort of person who is familiar with the approximate file sizes of all the dependent packages.

So the package screen could say, for example, something like:

    Installing will take up 57 MB disk space, leaving 9.5 GB free for other programs and documents.

Or if you have /home on a separate partition, something like:

    Installing will take up 57 MB disk space, leaving 4.2 GB free for other programs and system files.

Probably that text could be tweaked to be shorter, and probably it should look more like a warning if you're going to be left with hardly any space, and so on. But the important point here is that we don't even need to list the dependencies to solve the problem. There might be other problems for which listing the dependencies is a solution, but I suggest addressing those in separate bug reports. Does that seem reasonable?