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

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Aug 21, 2021, at 5:57, Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se> wrote:
> 
> 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.

Thank you Stephan, I'll try to produce something in a reasonable time frame. Is 
it better to file a bug report to make sure the issues are registered somewhere?

-- 
Jean-Christophe Helary @brandelune
https://mac4translators.blogspot.com
https://sr.ht/~brandelune/omegat-as-a-book/