If YaST is used to partition/format/encrypt/whatever some storage devices but the system lacks some of the tools needed to perform the operations, YaST has always shown a dialog alerting about the situation and allowing to install the missing packages. It looks like this:
But the presence of those tools was only checked at the end of the process, when YaST needed them
to create/format/encrypt new devices (in the screenshot above, YaST asked for cryptsetup because
it wanted to encrypt a new partition).
If the needed tool was already missing during the initial phase in which the storage devices are analyzed, the user had no chance to install the corresponding package. The user got the following warning.
Clicking in "details" would show which command exactly failed.
And clicking in "continue" will, indeed, allow to continue using YaST. But the representation of the system would be incomplete (in our example, the encrypted partition would look empty and non-encrypted).
During the previous sprint, an improvement was implemented and commited to SLE-15-SP2 and Factory. The dialog to install packages before commiting the changes to the system (first screenshot) has not changed. But when a package is missing for the analysis phase, we added the possibility of installing the package right away. The dialog looks like this:
Clicking on "details" shows the following information.
Although the new dialog indeed allows to user to install the packages, the YaST Team agreed on the review meeting that we need to improve the usability.
- It contains a significant amount of text for a pop-up
- It uses relatively technical terms like "probing" which may not be obvious for a final user
- It offers four buttons, with implications that may not be obvious from the labels
- It only shows the name of the packages to install when clicking in "details"
We would like to have something that is almost as simple and intuitive as the dialog using during the commit phase (first screenshot).
