[virt-tools-list] [PATCH 3/3] Redesign OS distro selection UI to be faster to use

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2018 at 05:48:06PM -0400, Cole Robinson wrote:
> I pushed patch #1 and #2, thanks
> 
> On 04/04/2018 09:35 AM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > The current OS distro selection UI is fairly cumbersome to use. First
> > you need to decide on a variant, then decide a distro and then look for
> > the version you want. The list is filtered by default so only a subset
> > of OS are displayed. So for less common distros you'll then need to
> > start again and tell it to show all OS to try to find the one you want.
> > 
> > The core problem is that we have an incredibly large list and want to
> > make it easy for the user to find a specific entry. The modern UI
> > paradigm for this problem is to provide interactive search with
> > live updated results. The current UI does provide an interactive search
> > facility on the OS version results, but you still have to first select a
> > variant to be able to use the search which is unhelpful.
> > 
> > This patch attempts to better apply the search UI design to the OS selection
> > problem. We get rid of the notion of variants, distros and version, and
> > provide a single text entry box in which the user can type a few letters
> > of the OS name. As they type, a popover displays the matching results
> > filtered on OS name. By default end of life OS will be hidden, so in
> > general there will only be a small handful of results left after just
> > typing a few characters. This makes it very quick to find and select the
> > desired OS, without needing to provide a mutli-step navigation hierarchy.
> > 
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1464306
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange at redhat.com>
> 
> Nice, this definitely seems better to me, and avoids having to worry
> about adding categories like Pino's patch.
> 
> Pino, since you worked on this UI before too, what are your thoughts?
> 
> Some ideas/thoughts:
> 
> * get rid of the label entirely and just have the search field take up
> the whole horizontal space.

I had the label for reporting the auto-detect result, but I guess we
could just push the auto-detect result into the search field text box.
Would also need to auto-fill the text box with the full match when we
select a distro.

> * libosinfo eol data needs to be expanded... type in 'linux' and see
> every mandriva/mageia release, altlinux release, etc. maybe it can be
> made mandatory in the schema to avoid missing this info

Yeah, we should definitely make an effort to fill in missing EOL info.
Mostly just requires searching wikipedia IME, sometimes the vendor's
own website.

> * typing in 'rhel' returns no results... maybe we need to match on short
> id as well

Might be nice to display the short-id in the list too, if we're
matching on that ?

> * some placeholder text like 'type here to search...', and/or when
> autodetect is selected but before detection we fill in with 'Autodetect'
> placeholder
> * say a user types in 'mint', no results pop up (expectedly), they are
> not sure where to go next. maybe we always show results for 'generic' or
> similar. I think there's bigger work needed here though, like having a
> 'latest-linux' meta-os that generally supports all virtio devices

There is a "Generic" entry that appears in the list, presumably something
added by virt-manager thoug, since that's not part of the osinfo DB. Users
have to know to search for that though. I was trying to avoid adding special
cases to the list searching UI.

Perhaps the search field should always default to "Generic" as a starting
point if the user has not entered anything, or if auto-detect fails. That
would eliminate the codepath of having no OS selected entirely.

Regards,
Daniel
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