package.el, a bug ? and a UX issue ?

[Jean-Christophe Helary <lists@traduction-libre.org>]

1) after filtering on marked packages, clearing the filter removes the marks

After packages-list is updated, using U marks the packages that can be upgraded and a message that looks like this is displayed:

Packages marked for upgrading: 5

When I filter the list with package-menu-filter-marked (/ m) I get the marked list of packages to upgrade.

When I clear the filter with package-menu-clear-filter (/ /) I go back to the original list *but* all the marks for upgrading are gone: when I hit x expecting to be able to install the marked packages, I get "No operations specified"...

package-menu-clear-filter is defined as follows:

(defun package-menu-clear-filter ()
  "Clear any filter currently applied to the \"*Packages*\" buffer."
  (interactive nil package-menu-mode)
  (package--ensure-package-menu-mode)
  (package-menu--generate t t))

Even when I check package-menu--generate I don't see that it is supposed to clear the marks, am I missing something ?

2) The upgrade messages are not very useful

So, the number of packages to upgrade is displayed.

This comes from package-menu--mark-upgrades-1 which has:

(message "Packages marked for upgrading: %d" (length upgrades))

"upgrades" contains a list of new packages including their new version number, but we only have the length of it.

If I hit X now, I have the list of old packages with their old version number and a "upgrade y or n" message that does not leave much room for details. The old version number 

So, I'm wondering if it would not be a better user experience to have the U command above directly display the list of packages with package-menu-filter-marked instead ?

That way, the user can still directly use X to proceed, or eventually go back to the package list and add packages (that's, if the issue 1 above did not exist).

Are the two points above reasonable issues to work on ?


-- 
Jean-Christophe Helary @brandelune
https://mac4translators.blogspot.com
https://sr.ht/~brandelune/omegat-as-a-book/