nipunvashistha
commented
6 years ago Hello @Ana06 @bgeuken , I am Nipun Vashistha, an undergrad student at IIT Roorkee. I am primarily a UI/UX designer and front-end developer. I have been doing some research on the OBS system, about what the information architecture of OBS, the different user flows, the stakeholders, and how exactly does the whole packaging system work for Linux distributors. I feel like the whole system is a bit complex to use, especially for a first time user. A first time user will have a hard time getting all the actions and functions. There is a lot of scope to improve and implement the overall User Experience of the system, especially the search feature and the project flow. I want to contribute and work with you on this project. Currently, I'm learning more about Packaging as it is important to about the system you are designing, and also trying to learn Ruby on Rails since I have no previous experience in the same. Can you please tell me how do I proceed?
bgeuken
parasitecruncher
Ana06
Project Title: Improve user experience in Open Build Service
Description:
Open Build Service, normally abbreviated as OBS, is a generic system to build and distribute binary packages from sources in an automatic, consistent and reproducible way. The openSUSE public instance is running at https://build.opensuse.org.
OBS user interface is in many cases not intuitive and difficult to use, especially for new users. There are workflows that could be improved to make users lives much more comfortable and new features that could be introduced. During the last years, the large OBS community has suggested many improvements in this regard. The objective of this project is to implement some of these ideas:
The project monitoring page gives users an overview of all the package builds of a project, for example on the OBS:Server:Unstable page. The content of this page has been increased to the point that it is now overloaded, looks broken and is really difficult to read. During the project a better structured page will be designed and implemented. For example, icons could be used for states instead of words, build target with similar names could be condensed to tabs and the table could be replaced with individual package divs. Related issue: https://github.com/openSUSE/open-build-service/issues/410.
Currently it is only possible to upload one file at a time, which is painful when uploading many files. We want to allow uploading multiple files at once to make this task faster and less repetitive for our users. We also have a really cool feature to upload files from GitHub, but it is that hidden that nobody is using it! We want to give this feature more visibility and improve the workflow. Related issue: https://github.com/openSUSE/open-build-service/issues/242
The watchlist is used to bookmark projects. It is already a useful and very used feature, but because of that we want to improve it's usability. We want to allow give an alias to the projects there, grouping projects for long lists and indicate when you are in a bookmarked page.
On the web site of a repository belonging to a project, there is no obvious way to add it to a package manager, such as zypper. Related issue: https://github.com/openSUSE/open-build-service/issues/407
Deliverable:
The UI / UX of OBS improved:
Mentors: @Ana06, @bgeuken, @ChrisBr
Skills: UI/UX knowledge, HTML, Ruby, Ruby on Rails and Java Script. Packaging knowledge would also help but is not mandatory. And the most important thing: a great desire to learn! 😉
Skill Level: Hard
Get started:
Pick one of the
good first issuelabelled issues and get in touch with the mentors! We recommend you to make at least one contribution to the project as that will help you to find out if this is the right project for you and to write a proposal, but you do not need to send a lot pull requests. The decision to select a student is made based on the proposal and not in the number of previous contributions. And remember that quality is more important than quantity! 😄