subiquity/DESIGN.md

subiquity design notes

UI

basic ground rules:

1. Subiquity is entirely usable by pressing up, down, space (or return) and the occasional bit of typing.

2. The UI never blocks. If something takes more than about 0.1s, it is done in the background, possibly with some kind of indication in the UI and the ability to cancel if appropriate. (We should consider making sure that if we pop up a progress dialog while something happens -- e.g. applying keyboard configuration, which the user just has to wait for until going on to the next screen -- that the dialog appears for at least, say, 0.5s to avoid flickering the UI).

3. General UX principles that it is worth keeping in mind:

   1. Prevent invalid use if that makes sense (e.g. unix usernames can never contain spaces, so you simply can't enter spaces in that box)

   2. When rejecting input, be clear about that to the user and explain what they need to do differently (e.g. when you do try to put a space in a unix username, a message appears explaining which characters are valid).

   3. Make the common case as easy as possible by doing things like thinking about which widget should be highlighted when a screen is first shown.

4. Subiquity is functional in an 80x24 terminal. It doesn't matter if it falls apart in a smaller terminal and obviously you can get more information on a larger terminal at once, but it needs to work in 80x24.

urwid specific ranting

subiquity is built using the urwid console user interface library for Python. urwid is mostly fine but has some design decisions that have meant that we're sort of slowly re-implementing pieces of it.

The main one of these is that in urwid, widgets do not have a size; they inherit it from their parent widget. While this is unavoidable for the "outer" widgets (subiquity does not get to decide the size of the console it runs in!) I don't think it leads to a good appearance for things like stacked columns of buttons, which we want to fit to label length (and label length depends on which language it is being used in!). There is a similar tension around having scroll bars that are only shown when needed (scroll bars should only be shown when the contained widget "wants" to be taller than the space available for it).

subiquity has a few generic facilities for handling these:

• The subiquitycore.ui.containers module defines a ListBox class that automatically handles scroll bars. It is used everywhere instead of urwid's ListBox class (it does not support lazy construction of widgets like urwid's does).

• The subiquitycore.ui.stretchy module defines classes for creating modal dialogs out of stacks of widgets that fit to their content (and let you say which widget to scroll if the content is too tall to fit on the screen).

• The subiquitycore.ui.width module defines a widget_width function, which knows how wide a widget "wants" to be (as above, this isn't a concept urwid comes with).

• The subiquitycore.ui.table module defines classes for creating Tables that act a little like <table> elements in HTML.

Subiquity also has replacements for the standard containers that handle tab cycling (i.e. tab advances to the next element and wraps around to the beginning when at the end).

urwid can be extremely frustrating to work with, but usually a good UI can be implemented after sufficient swearing.

The typical screen

A subiquity screen consists of:

1. a header
2. a body area, which usually contains
   1. an excerpt (which explains what this screen is for)
   2. a scrollable content area
   3. a stack of buttons, including "done"/"cancel" buttons for moving between screens

The header has a summary line describing the current screen against an "ubuntu orange" background.

The body area is where most of the action is. It follows a standard pattern described above, and the subiquitycore.ui.utils.screen() function makes it very easy to follow that pattern. Many screen have "sub-dialogs" (think: editing the addresses for a NIC) which can be as large as the whole body area but are often smaller. The base view class has show_overlay/hide_overlay methods for handling these.

Custom widgets

subiquity defines a few generic widgets that are used in several places.

Selector is a bit like an html <select> element. Use it to choose one of several choices, e.g. which filesystem to format a partition with.

ActionMenu is a widget that pops up a submenu containing "actions" when selected. It's used on things like the network screen, which has one ActionMenu per NIC.

Spinner is a simple widget that animates to give a visual indication of progress.

Forms

subiquity.ui.form defines classes for handling forms, somewhat patterned after Django's forms. A form defines a sequence of fields and has a way of turning them into widgets for the UI, provides hooks for validation, handles initial data, supports enabling and disabling fields, etc.

Forms make it very easy to whip up a screen or dialog quickly. By the time one has got all the validation working and the cross-linking between the fields done so that checking this box means that text field gets enabled and all the other stuff you end up having to do to make a good UI it can all get fairly complicated, but the ability to start easily makes it well worth it IMHO.

Code structure

Subiquity follows a model / view / controller sort of approach.

The model is ultimately the config that will be passed to curtin, which is broken apart into classes for the configuration of the network, the filesystem, the language, etc, etc. The full model lives in subiquity.models.subiquity and the submodels live in modules like subiquitycore.models.network and subiquity.models.keyboard.

Subiquity presents itself as a series of screens -- Welcome, Keyboard, Network, etc etc -- as described above. Each screen is managed by an instance of a controller class. The controller also manages the relationship between the outside world and the model and views -- in the network view, it is the controller that listens to netlink events and calls methods on the model and view instances in response to, say, a NIC gaining an address.

The views display the model and call methods on the controller to make changes.

Obviously for most screens there is a triple of a model class, controller class and a view class for the initial view, but this isn't always true -- some controllers don't have a corresponding model class.

Doing things in the background

If the UI does not block, as promised above, then there needs to be a way of running things in the background. Subiquity uses a few different ways to do this but new code should use asyncio. subiquity.async_helpers defines two useful helper functions run_in_thread (just a nicer wrapper around run_in_executor) and schedule_task (a wrapper around create_task that works before the event loop is started). trio has nicer APIs but is a bit too new for now.

The older approach which is still present in the codebase is the run_in_bg function, which takes two functions: one that takes no arguments and is called in a background thread and a callback that takes one argument, and is called in the main/UI thread with a concurrent.futures.Future representing the result of calling the first function. I tried a few abstractions to try to make things clearer -- subiquity.tasksequence.TaskSequence and subiquity.controllers.installprogress.StateMachine being two -- but they didn't really help all that much in the end.

A cast-iron rule: Only touch the UI from the main thread.

Terminal things

Subiquity is mostly developed in a graphical terminal emulator like gnome-terminal, but ultimately runs for real in a linux tty or over a serial line.

The main limitation of the linux tty is that it only supports a font with 256 characters (and that's if you use the mode that supports only 8 colors, which is what subiquity does). Subiquity comes with its own console font (see the font/ subdirectory) that uses different glyphs for arrows and has a check mark character. gnome-terminal supports utf-8 of course, so that just works during development -- one just has to be a bit careful when using non-ascii characters. There are still plenty of characters in the standard font subiquity does not use, so we can add support for at least a dozen or so more glyphs if there's a need.

subiquity.palette defines the 8 RGB colors and a bunch of named "styles" in terms of foreground and background colors. subiquitycore.core contains some rather hair-raising code for mangling these definitions so that using these style names in urwid comes out in the right color both in gnome-terminal (using ISO-8613-3 color codes) and in the linux tty (using the PIO_CMAP ioctl).

Testing

subiquity definitely does not have enough tests. There are some unit tests for the views, and a helper module, subiquitycore.testing.view_helpers, that makes writing them a bit easier.

subiquity supports a limited form of automation in the form of an "answers file". This yaml file provides data that controllers can use to drive the UI automatically (this is not a replacement for preseeding: that is to be designed during the 18.10 cycle). There are some answers files in the examples/ directory that are run as a sort of integration test for the UI.

Tests (and lint checks) are run by travis using lxd. See .travis.yml and ./scripts/test-in-lxd.sh and so on.

For "real" testing, you need to make a snap (snapcraft snap), mash it into an existing ISO using ./scripts/inject-subiquity-snap.sh, and boot the result in a VM.

There are integration tests that run daily at https://platform-qa-jenkins.ubuntu.com/view/server (unfortunately you need to be connected to the Canonical VPN -- i.e. be a Canonical staff member -- to see these results).

Development process

When adding a new feature to subiquity, I have found it easiest to design the UI first and then "work inwards" to design the controller and the model. Subiquity is mostly a UI, after all, so starting there does made sense. I also try not to worry about how hard a UI would be to implement!

The model is sometimes quite trivial, because it's basically defined by the curtin config, and sometimes much less so (e.g. the fileystem model).

Once the view code and the model exist, the controller "just" sits between them. Again, often this is simple, but sometimes it is not.