On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 11:24 AM, Loïc Minier <loic.min...@linaro.org> wrote: > Hey > > On Thu, May 26, 2011, Fathi Boudra wrote: >> ==== releases.linaro.org layout proposal 1==== > > Jamie, Alexander and myself once had a long and relatively painful > discussion about the ideal layout; my main argument in the discussion > was that the names and contents of our releases will keep changing, we > will rebrand the names we use for our outputs (e.g. "LEB" or platform > images), we will add and remove outputs, so my proposal was for the > toplevel to be the date of the release, much like the > http://releases.ubuntu.com/ toplevel. For a similar discussion on > snapshots.linaro.org, http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ might be a good > example where there's only a toplevel by "project", then subdirs by > date or arch, or whatever. > The main advantage of having a /$year-$month/ toplevel is that you > magically historize the old product names; people will want the latest > release anyway. > Back when Alexander, Jamie and I had this discussion, there was an > area of confusion for the end-user because we had 6-monthly outputs and > monthly outputs, and monthly outputs were not on releases.linaro.org. > > > But interestingly your argument is about user experience, not about the > best layout. I don't think browsing a file hierarchy over http is a > particularly friendly user experience, nor reading multiple web pages, > downloading multiple bits. A better user experience is if we can > provide pre-built consumable images as we discussed at Budapest, or if > we can provide a tool to download the right hwpack + rootfs for your > board and then run linaro-media-create automatically; James Tunnicliffe > is working on such a "TestDrive" tool. > It's fair to say that we could make the web user experience better, > but instead of changing the layout, could we simply provide entry > points to browse related things together? For instance we could offer > a search page to find all OMAP related downloads. Or we could generate > a page per board with all the latest files related to this board. >
Noone seriously wants to design a great user experience around a HTTP file browsing hierarchy. However, the hierarchy there should make sense and using user experience to test whether it makes sense is one valid way to do that imo. And yes, I agree with you that this is not the main landing page for users that want to consume linaro images and copmonents (that will be http://linaro.org/remote/downloads like); however, all this does not mean we shouldn't fix the layout to be more consistent and better reflect our new monthly release model. So in other words, whatever we do and argue, we have to do something about the layout for this release, because the current layout does not work well anymore, e.g. 1. refers to linaro-n which is quite ubuntu centric 2. doesn't reflect monthly releases very well (see how ubuntu has beta/alpha, 11.04 11.05 in that hierarchy) 3. doesn't scale to allow working group outputs to be included in a clean way 4. there is no place fit android in the current layout > As part of TestDrive, James Tunnicliffe wrote a tool to scan images on > releases.linaro.org and generate a sqlite3 db. We could use this tool > or this db, or a similar approach, as the source of information for > "everything related to beagleboard" or "latest images for all platforms". > Integration with Launchpad could we done via launchpadlib; no need to > copy the tarballs around, or change existing practices or hosting > locations. All those arguments are good. But thats all on top for me. We can certainly invest in improved tools and webservices etc. However, we need to discuss how to layout the releases.linaro.org webserver for this release to fix immediate issues. Lets move step by step and focus in this thread on the layout of releases.linaro.org. We can discuss the big download future picture outside of this thread ;). -- - Alexander _______________________________________________ linaro-dev mailing list linaro-dev@lists.linaro.org http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev
