Well, I haven't totally dropped off the map :)

I finally got around to fixing xfce to work again. I had to drop a bunch of my hidden config files to get it working. I don't know what the corruption was, but meh.

So I have had to start rebuilding a new desktop, so I went with the old time industrial theme which seems to go with warehouse 13, so I've catured some w-13 screenshots to use as the background. It is coming along nicely. Now if someone artistic could create a w-13 icon theme that would be great :D

I've been a lazy blogger

For the few people following my blog, sorry I haven't posted anything for such a long time. The google summer of code project is well underway. My student is doing well.

I am mentoring a student for the kuroo project to revitalize it and bring it up to date with kde4 and integrate a new portage api into it so that it can keep current with changes in the vdb, etc.. It should bring a well liked portage gui back to life.

So a progress report:

kde4 porting is done and it has been changed to not rely on kde4 specificly but QT4. that should make it more portable to other desktops without the need of having more kde packages installed.

There is a kuroo4 live ebuild and a kuroo overlay, along with that are some other development pkgs. A layman-8888 ebuild that installs a branch I coded which creates a high level API to perform all layman actions. Unlike the command line interface this api is import-able into other programs, so running it in a terminal is not needed. In fact it will no be able to fully incorporate layman into any of the current/future portage gui's. To go along with that, Cazou has created c-layman which is a c interface lib that connects any program that can incorporate c lib's into it's sources. This is needed for kuroo as well as others to be able to interface with the api.

The new portage api, I have begun coding. I haven't gotten far with it yet, but I do need to get it done soon or Cazou will run out of work aside from chasing down bugs. Many of which are related to the old kuroo method of reading the portage metadata cache directly.

Porthole has been suffering lately as a result. I put out a -r2 to fix the missing import stopping it from saving config file changes to /etc/make.conf or /etc/portage/* files. And as a result of the way I have my system permissions, failed to get the patch correct, so it still doesn't work. I'll get it fixed soon, I promise.


I now have a working kvm setup using an init script from Brian Harring who is now a council member. With it I now have few kvm images that I can use for testing. One of those is a kde4 based desktop. Mostly for kuroo4 testing. I will be creating and using more images to better test porthole before releasing new versions so I can avoid the few blunders of the current ones.

My knee is doing a lot better and I have returned to work full time. I also am able to get some of the house/yard work done. We had been planning a number of house/yard reno's for many years and got some financing arranged last year. My knee injury postponed any progress on that front. But we have been getting started on a few things now. This weekend is a big cleanup push. I've been clearing some bushes, blackberries, etc. from along an old rotted fence, which is next on my list.

If there is anyone out there that wants to help incorporate any of the new things into porthole, give me a shout. I am going to be busy for the next year with work and house reno's so won't have the time I spent last fall/winter. There is lot's of new possibilities, improvements to porthole that need some coding.

That's all for now. I promise to keep this blog updated more frequently...

Busy, busy, busy,...

Wow, April has been a very busy month. I meant to keep you updated to the goings on, but didn't seem to get to it. My daughter's softball season has been up and going, not to mention all the other activities that she needs to be brought to, etc.... I have been starting back to work also on a part time basis, but my knee doesn't seem to be handling more than a 4 hour shift. I have also become a gentoo mentor for the Google Summer Of Code program. That has taken up quite a bit of time as well reading/evaluating proposals. I believe the announcement for the GSOC will come out later today (this is still my night before). I have also been contacting the other portage gui front-end developers to begin discussing the upcoming merge into portage of a public API. Coding wise I have not been able to accomplish much, mostly fix some bugs in gentoolkit, and do a little more work to portage's emaint that I've been re-working so that all its modules are available as import-able modules for use by portage, other maintenance tools, or even possible gui front-ends or plug-ins.

Oh, and some great news!!!! I have put in a stabilization request for porthole. So far it has a ppc stable keyword, approval for x86 and sparc to go stable, I just need to get the ebuild updated. So if you use porthole on any of the arch's that aren't marked stable, get after the arch team to stabilize it. If you are using it on an arch that is not yet listed in the ebuild, speak up, open a bug to get your arch added to the list.

Anyway, I have a busy day ahead for me tomorrow, so I should head off to bed. I'll be in touch about the gsoc project I'll be mentoring after the official announcement has been made.

status update

I've been a little busy lately and haven't had much time for a new post. I have the eclean re-write working good and have several unit tests for it, but to test it all would mean having 10 times the code just to run the tests on the real code. You will be able to try out the re-write in the gentookit-0.3.0_rc10 release coming out soon. For cleaning the packages directory it now relies on emaint from portage to fix the Packages index file. For now it runs it in a sub-process from eclean, but I hope to get some changes approved to emaint, so that eclean will be able to use it directly. It will then not disrupt the output from eclean like it will for now. Gentoolkit is now going to be python-3 capable and will require a minimum of python-2.6 to work correctly. Also, for those not following the gentoo-soc mail list, an idea for a network enabled eclean version was brought up that would be useful for central NFS servers serving the distfiles or packages directories. With that i have been able to deduce that it will not take much more work to add shared disfiles and/or packages ecleaning ability. So perhaps look for that feature in the near future, perhaps in gentoolkit-0.3.1.



It also looks like my knee injury is nearly healed up and I may be returning to work soon. A good thing about that is it might help to shed the 20+lbs of weight I put on since the injury.

I also need to code some additional modules for the new analyse utility I started, along with a major backend re-structuring for porthole. I've been also asked to clarify some of the analyse descriptions, abilities that I posted about earlier. So look for that this week. That's it for now.

I finally got another porthole release out. I had been dragging my heels a little about it, but I also found a fixed a few more bugs. So this should hopefully be a release that makes it to a stable keyword. There was one potential bug in 0.6.0 that I found which could make an annoyance to fix for a user, not critical. So I did not push for it to go stable. (Although far buggier apps get stable keywords)

Porhole-0.6.1 has added a number of small features, like a highlighted eduild viewer which uses gtksourceview and the gentoo syntax highlighting rules. The Changelog has been completely re-vamped and now sports a new custom highlighting view. I so need to improve it slightly for dealing with overlays that do not have a changelog file so that it will look in the main tree for that one.

That covers most of the visible changes to porthole since the 0.6.0 release. I have been busy working on elclean code and have it ready for adding in an emaint binhost call to fix the packages index file. So on that note with the porthole release out the door I got busy splitting up the portage emaint program so that it's modules could be used directly by other python apps or portage front-ends (think porthole plug-in). So I'm hoping the powers that be like the emaint changes I've made, one of which is a modular plug-in system for emaint modules. It makes it easy to add or remove modules to the utility as changes are needed or additional functionality is created. Without the need to change the cli or gui front-end. So with that pretty much done I'm getting back to completing the eclean rewrite so it can be merged back into trunk for a release.

I have also done some more work on the new analyse utility, but will leave that for another post so I can better explain it.

New gentoolkit utility --- analyse

Well, I've gone and done it again, I haven't finished the eclean re-write and I've found something else to work on. It all started from a forum post. He wanted to fix his mistakes and it looked like the only way was the hard way.

Having been doing more gentoolkit coding I put together a quick and dirty python script to output some USE flag info about his installed pkgs. With that and me saying I could add some more code to spit out a package.use file populated with what is installed/what flags enabled/disabled. I have now been coding it up and have it now working for USE flag analysis and rebuild. I plan on adding more so it can analyse and repair keywords and mask files too.

I also would like to code up yet another /etc/portage/package.* cleaning tool. Since It'll have nearly/all the functions needed for gathering the info, may as well do that too. All the main functionality will also be importable for other apps to use as library functions/methods.

analyse rebuild -pv use

analyse analyse -uv use

left: showing the output of the report. Enabled USE flags are marked with a leading + and colored blue. Disabled USE flags are marked - and colored red. Unset USE flags are plain text.

It also indicates if the flag is a system default, the number of packages that have it enabled/disabled/unset and using the --verbose option lists the packages.

right: Part way down the report. notice that mplayer has faac faad flags enabled but ffmpeg does not. Something that I didn't notice before. Now I know to set them for ffmpeg too.

This last one shows the totals at the end of the analyse report.

Also if you can think of a good "e" name for it to go along with the other gentoolkit apps like eclean & equery. Post a comment.

some of the names so far:

• erepair
• esylana (analyse spelled backward)

more ecleaning

I'ts been awhile since my last post. I've made good progress on the eclean modular re-write. The cleaning modules have been completed, but not tested yet. I have gotten about halfway coding the testing modules for it. I swear there is going to be 3 times more lines of code to test those functions that there are lines of code in the functions. This is due mostly to having to create a small fake distfiles and packages directories and a small fake portage dbapi to return the pre-programmed data back to the function/module being unit tested.

The output module should be complete aside from minor changes.

The search module has mostly been re-worked and the distfiles search function has now been turned into a class and split up into 13 smaller functions/methods. Along the way I discovered that there were several bugs in the code logic that could potentially clean installed sources that it should not have. I have that mostly fixed now, but intend to extend some of the options a little where I can. Along the way I have been optimizing the code to increase speed for the slow non-destructive distfiles search. I have managed to reduce the time taken by approximately 10-12% while at the same time doing a more thorough search.

I have also added a -v, --verbose option which will give more info about it's actions and findings. useful for debugging and knowledge about your system. It will also inform you of installed package versions that are no longer in any installed trees/overlays, while protecting them from deletion.

That's all for now, gotta go on some errands...

Distractions

I've been distracted away form porthole code lately. Well not completely, I do have an ulterior motive. I am working on gentoolkit code again. Namely a modular rewrite of eclean.

eclean was an all in one python script that contained a number of unwieldy methods and functions which made it difficult to modify and nearly impossible to create test functions for. One of the primary reasons I started on it was to split the back-end functioning code from the output printing code similar to most of the newly redone equery modules. That way the code can be used by other applications. So, I began by separating the script into a python package containing 5 files and a nearly empty script that just loads and calls the main() .

Those 5 files being:

1. cli.py to handle all command line interface argument parsing and start the requested action.
2. search.py with all the search related methods and functions which determine the files to be cleaned.
3. exclude.py containing the exclusion file parsing and handling code.
4. output.py for the screen output and user interaction.
5. clean.py to handle the actual cleaning process.

The end result should be one that has a number of automatic tests run on it to check that any code modifications are performing correctly as well as code that will be easier to maintain.

It will also then be possible for the code to be used in other apps such as a planned plug-in module for porthole. :)

Translators Needed

I have porthole pretty much ready for another release. I have the translation files updated with any string changes and ready for a final edit.

1. Polish language is fully updated (just need to commit it). Thank you, Arkadiusz Kowalski.
2. German is nearly up to date, a few minor strings to check, Thank you, Timo Gurr.
3. French, is in need of checking and/or fixing.
4. Italian, is in need of updates.
5. Russian, is in need of updates.
6. Vietnamese, is in need of updates.

If you would like to see porthole translated into your language please leave a comment or email me. It is quite simple to do, just takes some time and knowledge of both English and the target language. There are tools like poedit to help.

And so Christmas came and the New Year begins

It's been the usual busy time of the year, with all the extra running around, preparing things. Getting the gifts for the people close to you. Trying to keep my wife from going overboard with the giving (again). It has been a good Christmas overall, lots of new toys, kids got some too (he he).

I had been hoping to get a release out for Christmas, but got a little too busy and lost concentration on what I was doing, so had a little break. The coding I was doing was centered more on su'ing porthole's processes that require root access while the majority of the code still runs as the user. I made a lot of progress, but came across a blocker in that gtk refused to do some things because of the detected su. It would run as all user or all root but not a mix. So I reverted most of the changes, (some were better even without su'ing). I believe I've come up with a better way without having to use policykit and the only python interface to it being through d-bus. Also due to the migration in python towards py-3k means using features of python-2.6 and greater. I am not about to do that for this release, but probably for the next major release of -0.7.0.

Porthole-0.7.0 I am hoping to have made all the changes needed to have multiple options for the backend package manager code it uses for data gathering as well as installing/syncing, etc..

So, I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and are starting the new year out right and happily so far.