Tuesday, February 15, 2011

layman

Well, I've gotten everything rebased to layman again and merged into master. Along the way are several more fixes to the work I started in overlord. It is available in the layman-9999 ebuild in the main portage tree.

I'd appreciate all those that test it to make sure I haven't broken anything. I want to make a few more smaller changes to the code before making a layman-1.5 release. So test away, let me know of any problems or quirks that need tweaking.

With that part behind me , I've started to work on extending porthole's plugin system to be able to add custom views via plug-ins. My main goal is to get a layman plug-in working for porthole. I plan to use the existing porthole layout using the category listings for the installed, main remote list, add in lists. The package view for the short info listing and the summary (or possibly it's own tab) for the detailed info. With that part accomplished, I'll add the ability to add, delete, sync repositories.

Back to layman, I was thinking of adding a file in the same vein as portage and the main tree to record the last sync time. With that, i'll extend the layman cli to include an option to list the last sync time(s). It will also be available to api consumer apps like portholes layman plugin.

Layman related, I've been in touch with the dev that created a new git-2.eclass to see about extending it to be able to handle multiple listed EGIT_URI's with in it's declaration. That way if there are multiple protocols available or server locations it can be cloned from, it can cycle through them until one succeeds. just like layman does for adding an overlay to your system. That way if you are behind a firewall and the git:// protocol can not get through, it will try the next uri which may very well be an http:// protocol which can succeed. That should make live ebuilds more accessible to users.

meanwhile back to coding... :)

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Getting Busy :)

Well, I know i haven't been very chatty here on my blog. Things have been getting quite busy.

I've been getting some work done on porthole:
  1. I've split up the mainwindow code into smaller managable chunks that all stack together.
  2. I've fixed the multi-selection for all commands like emerge, unmerge, update. Unfortunately I discovered a bad side effect of that. While selecting a bunch of dependencies I wanted to upgrade. I came across a pkg I emerged with --oneshot that I didn't want anymore. So clicked unmerge (old behavior would just unmerge the pkg selected), then continued selecting and then upgrade. To my surprise I discovered everything selected to upgrade failed due to wget failing. Then I discovered all the unmerge's which crippled my system. Fortunately I have --buildpkg enabled so was able to emerge a number of pkgs from the backups. My system is happily merging updates again. I still need to run revdep-rebuild after to catch any more missing deps from my unmerge stint.
I got to talking with Wizzleby (kportagetray developer) about the layman api I coded awhile back. That got us both going on some preliminary designs for collaborating on both a gtk and kde front-end to layman. Since I had not been getting any feedback about the new api from the main layman dev. I decided to start a fork to work on it more so that it can be released and ready for the guis front-ends. Well that lasted about a week, I made good progress on it, replaced the cli interface to use my new high level api. That resulted in a 20-35% speed increase. I am now the primary layman developer and maintainer. So now I have to port my changes back to layman's namespace. Anyway the new project's name is Overlord. I will keep it for the guis front-ends and possibly a few extras for layman. So give me some time and I'll have the changes in the Layman-9999 live ebuild ready for more testing.

I have been pushing to get the gentoo-guis mail list back in action again and discovered it hadn't been de-activated after all, but it was not listed either. So any of you interested in joining, it is gentoo-guis+subscribe@lists.gentoo.org. We welcome all
to join in.

We have started a new gentoo-guis overlay for our live ebuilds and development work. It is not yet listed in the main repositories list, but I do have a gentoo-guis repositories.xml file in the overlay you can download and configure layman to use to add it. Actually I made that easier to do in overlord. Those repo.xml definitions can be plugged in for automatic detection and inclusion. Yes, that will be ported to layman too :)

So, I am accepting volunteers for help with things on porthole, layman, overlord,...
:D