Wishlist for Interface Improvements (Changelog)

[Pavel Rojtberg]

I think there are some serious faluts with the way Synaptic handles changelogs.

1) A tab next to the descripton would be a better location for the changelog.
   Also it should be selected automatically for already installed packages,
since you
   most probably know what the package is about.

2) The way the changelog is display is as well very unhandy, since it is sorted
by date
   but the thing which intrests you most is which important changes were made.
   Therefore throwing all the changes between the installed version and the most
recent version
   together and then sorting them by importance would be much more suitable.

3) There should be some basic HTML parsing for package descriptions, so taht the
contained links
   would be actually clickable and images could be inserted.
   This would mostly help new users - more experienced ones should be able to
turn the image laoding off.

[Pavel Rojtberg (rojtberg)]

although the changelog might be very technical it is necessary to decide whether
you need to upgrade or not, which is important when the package is quite large
and your bandwidth quite small.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

(In reply to comment #1)
> although the changelog might be very technical it is necessary to decide whether
> you need to upgrade or not, which is important when the package is quite large
> and your bandwidth quite small.

Did you had a look at update-manager? It contains a more intelligent changelog
parser that will
only read the new changelog entries and skips the rest.

[Pavel Rojtberg (rojtberg)]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Did you had a look at update-manager? It contains a more intelligent changelog
> parser that will
> only read the new changelog entries and skips the rest.

yes, but it still does not sort the changes between the different releases.
But I guess this is the best, you can do without changing the format in which
the changelog is saved...
So I would be already happy if you could implement this behaviour in Synaptic.

[P (p92)]

(In reply to comment #0)
> 1) A tab next to the descripton would be a better location for the changelog.

I only agree with this. In fact, I am unable to see any changelog in synaptic for the moment. I might be dumb but I did not find where it is visible.
So A tab or a way to get the changelog as in update-manager would be great. I also agree that we don't have to use 2 applications to manage this.

[Simon Ruggier (simon80)]

I think screenshots would be extremely helpful to users of all kinds. A picture is worth a thousand words, and it's kind of a pain to have to resort to a web search or an installation in order to see one. One could implement this as extra fields in the control file that either point to an image URL, or a webpage URL that links to images. If anyone can suggest how and where I would raise this item with debian developers, I'd be willing to follow it up.

[Sebastian Heinlein (glatzor)]

Simon: please don't mix up bug reports. :)

This one is not about a central package web site. By the way we think about this from time to time too.

[Simon Ruggier (simon80)]

Oh, I wasn't talking about a central package web site either. The URLs could point anywhere, the point would be to save the user the time they would have spent finding the screenshots.

Also, I know my post may look like a random offtopic feature request, but I was actually posting in response to item 3 from the original description. My point is that I sort of like the suggestion, but think that the images and description should be kept separate, because otherwise we may see badly written descriptions that use images as a crutch, which would degrade the experience in text only package managers.

[Lionel Dricot (ploum-deactivatedaccount)]

Also, it should be possible to read changelog of possible upgrade before the upgrade (like update-manager does)