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Purpose

The /~username/+ppa/ppaname page should serve both of the following purposes:

• enable an interested user to find out what the PPA is for, decide whether they want to use it, and show them how they can use it,
• reassure the PPA publisher regarding the result of their recent actions (such as uploading a new build)

This page is currently being re-designed as part of the Launchpad 3-0 UI work. If you are interested you can take part at PPA 3-0 UI

Target user audience

The PPA Index page has at least two distinct target user audiences:

• Ubuntu users who may be interested in adding the PPA to their installation.
• Developers who are publishing software to their PPA. This Launchpad experience of this group ranges from novice to expert.

Note: It would be good to favour the former - interested *users* on the PPA summary page, while ensuring that developers still see the relevant information summarised on this page (and get to the more detailed info without hassle).

Use-cases

Deciding whether to add a PPA

Sally got a recommendation link from a friend to add the Chrome Daily builds PPA to her Ubuntu installation. Viewing the PPA in Launchpad, Sally reads the description and - being keen to try out Chrome - is not put off by the warning in the description. But just below the description, she notices that this PPA provides a custom version of a python library that she uses in her development work. Sally decides against adding the PPA to her system.

Su-jin, on the other hand, reads the "Adding this PPA to your software sources" instructions, copies the 'ppa:chromiumteam/daily' identifier, opens her software sources and pastes it in. She then opens add/remove programs and adds Chromium to her system.

Checking the state of the PPA after uploading a new package

Having just uploaded his first package to his first PPA, Alain refreshes the PPA summary at ~alain/+ppa/my_first_ppa hoping to get some feedback. He sees in the "Recent activity" section on the sidebar that his new package is in the queue waiting to be built. Alain leaves the page open and watches the recent activity section update as his package goes through the build states to fully built.

Looking for a particular application

Julian wants to know if this PPA provides a akregator but all he can see is a (source) package called kdepim. How can this issue be solved?

Option 1: we could list binary packages rather than source packages in the list.

Pros:

• users see the actual packages that they can install. Ie. in the above example, I can see akregator listed among the rest of the binaries produced by kdepim.

Cons:

• displaying all binary packages could be quite confusing, epecially when a lot of the time, the source package name is the same as the main binary that the user is after (ie. firefox-3.5), and technical users can always browse the binaries by expanding the sources.

Option 2: we could have a "Search this PPA for a program called: " form which would allow Julian to enter akregator and the results would show the source package expanded with the list of binaries.

Others?

Questions