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