Porthole 2011 GSOC project starting

Porthole has been chosen as one of this years GSOC projects. The project will encompass a complete re-structuring of porthole's backend so that it can make use of a new (soon to be stable) portage public API. Stable at this point means mostly a non changing interface for directly operating portage, getting information directly from portage while the backend code can change without fear of constant breakage for consumer apps like porthole.

The student doing the work is Cazou, the same person that worked to port kuroo to QT4 last year. This restructure is needed so that porthole can work even better with portage. It is also needed to be able to work properly with pkgcore which a backend for it will also be produced. That will give you more options as far as package managers are concerned.

More on this later...

All is not lost

Hey everyone. No I've not dropped off the edge of the earth.

I am gearing up for another season of mentoring for another gentoo gsoc project. This time it will be for porthole. This project is to finish to back-end re-structuring and create a new pkgcore back-end.

Other news, I am now the developer/maintainer for layman. I have implemented the new api I did last year. Extending and improving it some more. I have also moved the cli to use the new api. This has resulted in a 20-35% speed increase for the testing I've done. I've also started a porthole plug-in for it.

Even more porthole news:

Paul Varner has done some work and has helped me get porthole working in a prefix install. I am finishing up the changes, porting them from the dev branch into the master branch code. I'll push out a live ebuild and/or a -0.6.2_beta release hopefully soon. There has not been much in feature additions. mostly more code re-structure and cleanup so it should be easier to modify and maintain. some bugfixes...

Here is a screenshot of porthole running on fuzzyray's mac.

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.