[virt-tools-list] [virt-manager PATCH v4] Redesign OS distro selection UI to be faster to use

[Cole Robinson]

On 05/01/2018 07:51 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
> 

Thanks for the reviews everyone, I pushed this now, with just a small
change removing some pylint warnings.

So I see the popover window constraint thing that Pavel mentioned, which
is apparently the only option for popovers on x11 but wayland can put
the popover outside the toplevel window. To handle this the create
wizard size request had to be changed and now the window is all
stretched out and off center and looks dumb.

What does a popover give us now besides the cute arrow? Seems like we
can go back to either making this a combo box or a popup window, neither
have the window constraint

Thanks,
Cole