Comment 4 for bug 339951

First of all, I'm not so sure Joe would figure out he should be reading that guide, but lets assume he does. The guide contains lots of useful information. Most of which is of no use to Joe here. The only chapter which is at all relevant to Joe is chapter 2. So the page Joe sees should not confuse him with all that stuff about administrating PPAs. Let's treat the two sub chapters individually.

First we look into "Adding a PPA to your Ubuntu repositories". The chapter gives Joe an example that has actual apt configuration line, but they don't work because this example is not about the actual repository Joe is trying to get working. Also it does not tell him how to make use of them, but points him to a third web page. Now Joe has to look at three distinct pages (PPA page, PPA guide, repository guide) and combine information from all of those pages correctly.

Lets continue and look at "Adding a PPA's keys to your system". This provides options to Joe. That is just something you don't do. You never provide options to a guy who doesn't know what he is doing. The right thing to do would be to only tell him about the graphical way to do this. In addition you could have a link "command line instructions (for advanced users)". Again this chapter shows Joe an example that he is not going to follow, because it is not the AWN PPA that he is interrested in.

These are things that you could fix by having a new page for Jane's PPA. A one that is targeted for Joe and his fellow men. Ideally this page would contain a title Jane's software packages, maybe a picture of Jane and a list of software packages she has published. At some central location the page would state "Before you get to install these packages, you have to add Jane to your list of trusted software publisher's. Once you have done so, you can add individual packages from 'Add/Remove...' under 'Applications' menu on your desktop."

In that message "add Jane to your list of trusted software publisher's" would be a link to a web form that asks Joe the compulsory questions such as distribution he is using, and explains how he can find out that information. (it would be cool, if this information could be detected, but I'm not sure it is trivial) Filling the form would take Joe to a customized guide that'd tell him the minimum steps that he has to go through before he can install packages. There should be no choices, and all examples should only show data that Joe is actually going to need to complete the task.