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

[Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se>]

Jean-Christophe Helary <lists@traduction-libre.org> writes:

> 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"...

Sounds like a bug to me.

> 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).

Makes sense to me.  I'm not sure if we could do better than
package-menu-filter-marked, but perhaps that could be good for a
start.

> Are the two points above reasonable issues to work on ?

I think so, yes.  Both sound like pretty obvious improvements, so
patches would be welcome.