Re: Package List on Web Site

[David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu>]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au> skribis:
>
>> In particular, I have noticed that http://gnu.org/s/guix/package-list.html is now
>> over 1.5 MB in size and is startign to take an unacceptably long time to load (at
>> least for me).
>
> I think it’s rendering that takes time, not transfer per se (unless you
> have a very slow connection.)
>
> I would like it to use David’s guix-web JS code to add the search box
> and multiple-page split.  I suspect this would address the rendering
> time and usability issues.  But of course, that would need help from
> someone knowledgeable...  :-)

We could make a specialized application that did this, since guix-web
will soon enough be concerned with authentication and other things that
aren't needed here.  To do things the way guix-web does, it would
require a Guile server component for the JSON API.

> It would be ideal if this were done in a “progressive enhancement”
> fashion, such that it can still be viewed in emacs-w3m.

Yes, agreed.  This would be the hardest part, because guix-web is
designed as a "single-page application", using JavaScript for all
rendering.  I would be inclined to write this package list browser in
the same fashion, because it results in much more elegant code than the
jQuery soup we would otherwise be in.

What should the non-JS fallback viewer look like?  Should we just
display the full list as we do now?

-- 
David Thompson
Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
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