I often use openSUSE Build Service-Software Search for searching packages for openSUSE and install it with easy installation method (1 Click Install) but sometimes I got frustrated with the capability of software search. Below are 3 suggestion to makes OBS Software Search (OBS-SS) more better for daily usage :
- Sort with Newer Package. OBS-SS doesn’t sort the search result by any criteria (that’s means, I don’t know what the sort method on current search result 😀 ) and finding a newer packages need 2, 3 or more clicks to go to next page. I think it should be better if search result sorted by newer version or even better we can choose some sorting parameter/criteria. Hint : Try to search Firefox package and see where the newer package displayed.
- Add “ALL SUSE Version” parameter for distro version Combo Box. Currently, distro version combo box contains each SUSE version and others distro. It’s good but sometimes it took so many times only for searching a package on various openSUSE/SLES version. As an example, a package may not available for openSUSE 11.3 but it has compiled and available for openSUSE 11.1. It’s a way better if we can search the packages for all openSUSE/SLES version instead of choosing each SUSE version or choosing ALL distribution parameter. Note : I know installing a package that compile for different version may lead to the instability risk on the system, but it’s a different topic 🙂
- Search 3rd Party Repositories. Webpin has a capability to searching package within various repositories, e.g : Packman Repositories. It may be better to integrating Webpin capability into OBS-SS
Honestly, I don’t know the complexity on OBS-SS portal but IMHO, implementing the above improvement only need a few changes on current portal 🙂 .
The search results are sorted by relevance, see “calculate_relevance” in http://gitorious.org/opensuse/software-o-o/blobs/master/app/models/seeker.rb to see how it gets calculated. For firefox, I would suggest to do an exact match search:
http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=%22MozillaFirefox%22&baseproject=openSUSE%3A11.3&exclude_debug=true
For 3) I think we have legal problems to host links to 3rd party repos on opensuse.org…
@Tom,
Thank you for the exact match search sample, but, what do you think if the search result combine the relevance calculation and also the newer package on top of the older. The result will be calculate_relevance and also sorted out.
About Packman or others repos, if it has legal problems to link to their repos, why webpin could display the proper links and also provide one-click-install ?