Description of problem: If I have to select multiple package or package groups, I prefer to do select them all by browsing the group list and installing them at one go instead of select - install cycle that this UI supports. The use case is when I am about to install a package group or package which I know is going to take a long time. Even otherwise, I prefer batch processing packages and walking off my system while package management software does the job instead of waiting on it one by one. Actual results UI has no way to select multiple packages, package groups and doesn't differentiate between optional packages and default packages.
See http://www.packagekit.org/pk-help.html for the feature plan -- what you are describing will be worked on during 0.2.1 and 0.2.2.
Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
A temporary workaround for me has been to "yum erase gnome-packagekit", "yum install gnome-python2-gconf", and download and install the pirut RPM from the Fedora 8 repository. It seems to break nothing.
See http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2008/05/22/gpk-application-multiple-package-selection/ - what do you guys think of that?
I don't know how to describe this well but that looks a bit odd. I was hoping we would come up something more interesting than check boxes again but this is a much needed functionality and I would suggest pushing an update to rawhide and updates-testing repository for Fedora 9 asap. When selecting multiple apps, users just need a brief descriptions and the group information. Everything else can be foldable. You can either provide that description when hovering over a package or better yet a foldable tree view might work well. I think a third pane for this is what I don't really like since it makes it somehow look like a triple pane file manager from Mac OS X instead of a simple package manager.
Right, 0.2.3 should hit F9 in a few days/weeks time.