This document lists features that might yet be implemented in glpm, the gtk3 front-end to lpm. It is divided into the sections

• important missing features
• important changes
• desirable missing features
• desirable changes
• wishlist

The document is currently based on commit f1cfe59 of the gtk3 branch of dalglish:/var/lib/git/lpm.git.

(Above commit name corresponds to the value retrurn by: git log -1 –pretty=format:%h )

If any change or feature description has the remark (needs core change), the implementation would require a change to liblpm and therefore needs to be coordinated accordingly.

There are currently no recognized important missing features

The current view of available packages for installation also shows older versions of packages and the gui allows to select multiple versions and probably multiple varians of the same package, which is all not supported by plpm and might lead to unwanted/wrong installations. Furthermore, a change to the responsible property “show-old-versions” only takes effect after an application restart.

The switch between showing old versions or not should rather be implement as some control above the list (checkbox,slider), while showing the newest should always be default.

This of course has the consequence that upon changing the value the package list has to be re-read with a different value of newest. The chosen value of “newest/show-old-version” also changes what the user then can select:

• On newest=1/show-old-version=FALSE, the user may select any number of displayed packages for installation. Bar misssing dependencies in the catalogue and other technical problems this should then usually work
• On newest=0/show-old-version=TRUE, the user may then only select exactly one package and with all its name, version and variant passed to plpm

As the second case is only a desirable missing feature (that is also not implemented in the flkt gui), the important change therefore only amounts to:

• removing the show-old-version property
• always set newest to 1

Currently, the package lists get their width determined by the longest available package descripiton. In the real word, this leads to very wide lists that cause the action checkbox to be hidden from the user and effectively prevent him to select any packages for installation. To fix this, there seem to be two solutions:

1. Put the Action column to the front, leaving the description at the end
2. Trim the description to maybe 60 chars

I'd much prefer the first solution, as trimming might lead to unusable descriptions and sounds like more work.

While the notebook tab names certainly make sense internally, the are IMHO not very user-friendly. I suggest renaming them to:

• “Updates” can be left as-is
• “Available” should be changed to “Install New Packages” or something like that.
• “Installed” should be changed to “Show Local Packages” or something like that.

Im quite open to better ideas, but I think the hypothetical average user will look for what he wants to do and not the name of the needed data source for that.

Guess, my eyes just prefer that, so if that is not too difficult, I suggest to move the whole sidebar over to the top of the lists.

Concerning the placement of the Refresh and Cleanup buttons: As they are not clearly related to the below lists, it might be best to move them into a new Menu section “Actions”. This would also have the advantage that any further actions (view install log) would probably be much easier to add.

• verify package contents by hash (needs core change)

- install multiple, newest packages of default variant
- rename
- install one package with specified version and variant
- install one local lpk file
- put notebook tabs on top and rename then
- view install log
- remove installed packages
- downgrade installed packages
- new LPM logo
- application startup
- update-only startup (maybe using notify)
- group-privileged refresh
- show package contents
- verify package contents by hash
- show dependend packages
- debug mode
- remove unneeded code

1.4 Application startup

Currently, glpm performs a cataologue update at startup before displaying its main window. As the refresh may take some time, especially when using the lpc-http backend, it might be nicer if glpm only does the previous initialisation steps before and performs the refresh after displaying the main window. It then could also already display above plpm otubut block, and above maybe just a cool png picture, configurable at build time.

2. Package actions

The three main actions of glpm are:

• update: update all or selected package where an update is available
• install: install available packages that are not yet installed
• remove: remove installed packages that are no longer needed

2.2 Install new packages

In order to install new packages, the user should be presented with a searchable/filterable list of available, not already installed packages, that can be retrieved by calling lpm_findpkg_new().

The most simple solution is to call the function with the flag newest set to 1, which will only display the newest version of any pacakge. In that case, the user may choose multipe packages for installation. This is the part that should be implemented first.

The package lists….