Re: Package page

[Alex Sassmannshausen <alex.sassmannshausen@gmail.com>]

Hello,

pelzflorian (Florian Pelz) writes:

> On 11/11/2016 06:41 PM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Hello!
>> 
>> Adam Pribyl <pribyl@lowlevel.cz> skribis:
>> 
>>> The GuixSD package page
>>>
>>> https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/
>>>
>>> is getting somewhat large to load. It is also bit short sighted to
>>> list all packages on one html page. Any plans what to with this?
>> 
>> It’s a shame indeed and we should definitely add JS code to browse it.
>> There’s already code for that in Guix-Web¹ that could be used as a
>> starting point (the web site’s code is in guix-artwork.git²).
>
> Just my 2¢ as a user who does not yet have the time to contribute: I
> typically browse the Web with JavaScript disabled and don’t think
> JavaScript should be required without a good reason.

I tend to come at this from a similar perspective — though I consider a
nice UI to be a "good reason".  I tend to err on the side of "graceful
degradation", which is why the patch I provided tries to implement a
JS-less version first, upon which we could build JS functionality.

> Currently the packages page loads somewhat slowly in Netsurf and GNU
> Icecat for me (with and without JS) but I can search the packages with
> Ctrl+F. Please at least retain some sort of search functionality for
> non-JS users (server-side search through a form?).

Agreed. I think for now we can retain the one page load for all
packages.

The downside of having server-side search is that we lose the nice
simplicity of having a static web page as we do now.

I think the paginated pages approach I propose in my patch would provide
a compromise: you select the letter by which your package starts and
then you can do C-f.  Alternatively, take the risk and load the full
page…

Alex