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

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Thu, Apr 05, 2018 at 10:47:20AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> 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.

This is actually harder than it seems.  For modern windows, for example,
there is no defined end of life date at this time afaict, unless we want
to list each individual Windows 10 update patch level separately. For the
really ancient OS, finding this info is not so easy.

It should, however, be more practical to find release dates for everything.

So we could have a rule that treats OS with no EOL date, but a release
date greater than 5 years ago, as EOL. This should exclude abandonware,
without culling modern OS with no defined EOL.


Regards,
Daniel
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