These are the notes taken during the LCA
2003 Debian Usability BOF:
Topics:
Package selection
"Flavours" or "Subsets" as a subset of the Debian Universe
Something with a well defined user community
It is a distribution, with its own installer (both of which are subset
or a specialization of Debian)
Consists of:
- A set of packages to start with
- A set of packages priorities/recommendations
- A set of debconf defaults
Solve some usability problems
Examples: desktop, education, ham radio
Different sets of defaults
Infrastructure
- Technical infrastructure does not need to change
- Need policy updates
- "Flavour builder application"
Automated configuration
Different sets of package priorities
Allow people to define their own flavours
Do we need to release Debian or Debian Flavours?
Possible quick, dirty, bad hack:
- dpkg --{get,set}-selections
- infer user "profile" from the current set of installed packages
Package metadata
Flavour-specific data, package sections, package priorities, package
selection and other user-related data should not be in packages, but
in external sources
Package sections
- More than one section per package
Different instances of package descriptions ("general", "technical")
Supported mime-types
Usability bug reports
Gimp should mention Photoshop in the description
Need policy on how to file usability bugs
What is usability?
Usability for Debian
Core tools
Operating environment
Productisation
Integration
What a usability bug report is (and why it may be hard to recognize it)
Users that keep making the same mistake could outline a problem with
documentation
Can Debian fill a role of collector and filter for usability bugs for upstream?
Usability tutors? Debian Complaint desk? (can be handled by the desktop
group?)
Do we need a "usability" tag in the BTS? How we define it?
"usability-upstream" tag?