660259 - Exclude all add-ons and libraries that are version "initial" from the search index

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Add-on Builder, defect, P1)

Description

[Daniel Buchner [:dbuc]]

If the version of an add-on or library is set to "initial" (the default on creation) please exclude it from any search results.

Comment 1

[Sean McArthur [:seanmonstar]]

What if someone has made significant work on their addon or library, but never realized they could change the version name. Their work is never to be found via search?

Comment 2

[Daniel Buchner [:dbuc]]

Yeah that does sound like a problem. Luckily for those 3 people who make awesome libraries they use often with 200 revisions that still are marked initial, we will have a really nice "Sounds like a personal problem" section under the FAQ and help UI... :)

Comment 3

[Dave Dash [:davedash, :dd] (assign all bugs to mbrandt)]

Not sure how your versioning system works like, but rather than passing the puck to the user, why not just nix the initial version after they've made significant changes (after n number of revisions, they get promoted to 0.1).

Comment 4

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

Alternatively, would it be possible to hide all addons that match up with the templated code when you first click "Create Addon"?

Comment 5

[Sean McArthur [:seanmonstar]]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Alternatively, would it be possible to hide all addons that match up with
> the templated code when you first click "Create Addon"?

Something that would give the same result but be easier and less error prone would be to just not index addons/libraries until they've created at least one new revision?

Comment 6

[Daniel Buchner [:dbuc]]

I think we're arbitrarily dancing around the issue here. When you set it to 1 revision you'll still be getting a ton of useless addons/libs. When it is 10 or some other slightly higher number, that will likely give you more good ones but perhaps not as many as you would think (remember there are many revision creating events)

I don't want to grep files and examine the code because that is much more effort and can fail in other ways - for instance, what if I just add to the comment that is there by default? Then we're needing to judge what a sufficient change is, which is relative.

The reason I think a change of version from "initial" is a good solution, is that it's the person's way of naturally expressing their own intent to consider the addon/lib in question as something more serious. Additionally, I don't believe that it will be hard to discover where to change the version now that it shows you the field literally every time you hover the save icon (there is a save key combo for power users, but the button will be getting a lot of traffic)

For those reasons I believe the best answer is just to ignore the "initial" packages and perhaps show on the user's dashboard a little icon on the ones still marked "initial" that tooltip the message "initial package revisions not indexed in search" or something like that.

Thoughts?

Comment 7

[Dave Dash [:davedash, :dd] (assign all bugs to mbrandt)]

Let's then try that, see what breaks.

Comment 8

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

Eventually, it'd maybe be a good idea to add a "show ALL add-ons" option to the search to override this hiding of 'initial' addons?

Comment 9

[Piotr Zalewa [:zalun]]

I think having the option to search in all is the best way to go - we do not limit our users, just protecting them by default.

Comment 10

[Daniel Buchner [:dbuc]]

I am all for letting users turn off the initial exclusion. Dave, Sean, how about we exclude them by default, and have a checkbox in the left bar called Smart Filter or Smart Search and if it is unchecked we show all?

Comment 11

[Daniel Buchner [:dbuc]]

With some input from Wes, perhaps the checkbox could be: "Exclude empty packages"

Comment 12

[Dave Dash [:davedash, :dd] (assign all bugs to mbrandt)]

The exclusion work is done here:

/commit/13a292e


It softly depends on the pagination bug, because I branched from it.  If for some reason that gets delayed too much, I can do some kung-fu and get it out of there.

Comment 13

[Dave Dash [:davedash, :dd] (assign all bugs to mbrandt)]

/commit/f18e1e1