Comments on: PackageKit and Pango are now friends

By: Technical Blog of Richard Hughes » Blog Archive » Working at Red Hat

Technical Blog of Richard Hughes » Blog Archive » Working at Red Hat — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 17:40:17 +0000

[...] week or so, I put up a new screenshot on this blog of cool stuff I’m working on. Every week people critique my ideas, and I go away to fix them up so the next version [...]

By: Peng’s links for Tuesday, 2 December « I’m Just an Avatar

Peng’s links for Tuesday, 2 December « I’m Just an Avatar — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:52:58 +0000

[...] Hughes: PackageKit and Pango are now friends. When Pango comes across a document specifying particular fonts that you don’t have it can [...]

By: Evan

Evan — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:09:23 +0000

I also think that instead of asking to search for fonts it should ask for approval to install the font once its been found from the background.

From personal preference I’d rather see a notification with the option to install or ignore instead of forcing a dialog on me.

It would be nice if there is a way to ask the user in the future if they would like to have requires software installed automatically rather than being prompted again.

The same is true for being able to ignore future requests to install missing components. Though this one is a bit more dicey. Hopefully some of my suggestions are of help.

By: Charles Peng

Charles Peng — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 07:02:37 +0000

Oh, this is a awesome feature, it can automatically install fonts…

By: Jengu

Jengu — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:59:45 +0000

I agree with posters above that simply having an “Install” button would be better. If the packages can’t be found, the dialog should say so right away.

Also, what documentation is the Help button going to provide here? The only reason I can think of _not_ to install the fonts is time or hard drive space, and the help button could explain that, but you could also just put that in the dialog. Not sure which is better for usability.

By: Ralph Aichinger

Ralph Aichinger — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:33:41 +0000

I think this is great!

I would love to have one feature though (in fontconfig? in Pango?):

There are fonts I don’t want to show up in menus, because I do not
need them actively for my documents, I want the glyphs to show up
though. I would therefore love to install fonts “hidden” or for display only.

By: daniels

daniels — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:56:29 +0000

awesome!

By: Stoffe

Stoffe — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:09:08 +0000

Don’t ask again is as always an inescapable trap just waiting to happen (Oh shit turns out I do need tibetan, now what do I do). I think a better solution overall would be to be less intrusive with the notifications, such as allowing any app to get a notifictaion of this and display a ribbon or similar.

(Then again, I guess you’ll end up with same thing as the force-feeding of F-Spot that Nautilus and/or Ubuntu has decided I need – since it’s such a horrible app I guess I must have it showed down my throat. Still better than a popup.)

By: Mats Taraldsvik

Mats Taraldsvik — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:35:09 +0000

PK taking care of applications’ needed packages in this way is great!

I agree with Daniel Schierbeck, with a twist. ( In fact, I think this should be common behaviour ) If a package is needed, search in the background. If packages are found, present a dialog listing the packages, explanation and “Help”, “Search for alternative packages” “Cancel” and “Install”.

“Search for alternative packages” or, alternatively “Advanced Install” could just open PackageKit with the packages marked for installation. The advanced user could then choose what packages to install, or not to install.
The tricky bit, with this “Advanced Install”, would perhaps be whether the application should wait for PK to finish installing, since these packages are needed for viewing, playing etc.?

By: Daniel Borgmann

Daniel Borgmann — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:21:24 +0000

I would even prefer “Ignore” over “Cancel”. The user should not think that not searching for these fonts will stop him from using the document.

A “do not show again” box might be nice, but even nicer would be if the dialog would be an unobtrusive panel in the first place (“install missing fonts”). This of course would need special support by each application and couldn’t happen automagically like this. But should it really?

One of my biggest annoyances with GNOME session management just happens to be the amount of dialogs it tends to pop up, often stealing focus from each other and making it all but impossible to continue. This seems like one of those things which could add to the mess, if it’s not handled gracefully by each application.