Hi folks: Errors and informative messages that comes from zypp/yast and related stuff are just ..well ..plain horrible..:-(
In this mail I attempted to summarize the problems (although there are many more..and are easy to find) the main issue is this stuff is not user friendly and people gets confused... 1. zypper emits this messages when the connection to the server timeouts. Please insert media [sic] [ Curl error (huh ?) http://server... - I **do know** it uses Curl but..is the user supposed to be informed about that too? also I "cannot insert media" when the repository is an URI, wording is incorrect .. in that case I expect something like "cannot access installation source $URI..." ( nope, "metadata" ,"resolvable" or whatever geeky wording that requires to know what ) the low-level continues with... Error code : Unrecognized error --> oops, error not handled ;P Error message : connect() timed out --> What the &$&%/&%... who else than programmers know what connect() function call means ? <humor> maybe add to it , "if you dont known what connect() or CURL is, install the glibc-devel and curl-devel packages and RTFM" </humor> 2. probably the most infamous one is thrown when yast or other tools are accessign the zypp database... "A ZYpp transaction is already in progress." [.....] and then what x_X ? again, I do know what a "ZYpp transaction" is, but this one is very confuse, it does not tell the user what to do and why "is already in progress" also, Im not sure if the end user really needs to know what a ZYPP transaction is.. probably soemthing like "$SOFTWARENAME is already open and working with the package manager database...[more..] "... 3. zypper is too silent and combined with the slowness it gaves the impression to the user as it were hanging, unfortunately it lacks of some progress dialog and the -v is too verbose.. :-( 4. Some of the "Y" and "N" dialogs are awfully broken, in problem number 1 , there is a final "retry" dialog that appears.. press Y .. it does nothing :) also if you press no..other low-level I/O error messages appear... in other situations if you type other data rather than "Y" or "N" it does not recover and hangs foreva... 5. In Yast, when a package is locked and there is a conflict a popup dialog appears telling me in one of its options "unlock all resolvables".. geeky wording again :) shouldnt it say "unlock all needed packages" or something adecuate to a graphical UI designed to be used for people that does not have a **single clue** how Zypp/yast/whatever works internally ? 6. Stuff in zypp the throws exceptions : We all know this is useful for debugging.. but why show it to users ? why not a simple dialog: "An error ocurred : (short **clear** message) \n Error details has been written to **/unique/filename/of/the/errormessages-backtrace.txt please open a bug report attaching this file to the report.+(an accept dialog where applicable)". In general, everytime you see the errors messages, think " does the user will need to visit the wiki or read some manual to understand this ? " if the answer is yes, then the error message is bad.;-) There are **many** other examples, this mail only attempts to raise awareness of this general problem. Just my $2 chilean pesos. Cristian. ps: I already filled bug reports about some of this issues but no sign of activity till today.
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