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...

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.

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)

First Rambling's

Welcome to my blog.

Well, this is something new to me. It was suggested that I get a blog to help promote Porthole and to get more feedback, etc. So here goes, It seems that like most things, they change and evolve. I remember a time when the forums were buzzing with activity. Some of that activity seems to have been replaced by blogs. I have been reading a few of the Gentoo dev's blogs and find them informative, interesting and can be a good source of knowledge. I hope to do well in that respect and not blab on about nonsense or get too carried away into details few people will care about.

Anyway, I am currently the only developer/maintainer for Porthole, It is a graphical gui front-end for Gentoo's package management system "portage". I was not the original creator(s), They were Daniel G. Taylor and Fredrik Arnerup. I started in fairly early in it's development cycle and have continued with it. There have been others that have come and contributed some good advancements and features over the years, but I am currently alone in it's development.

I welcome feedback from users, both good and not so good as to how they use porthole and things they might like added or changed. As in nearly all things, that does not mean it shall be done, but it does help evolve things for the better. I will try to get things done in a timely manner, but it is something I do in my spare time for fun, relaxation and good mental exercise. A person has to keep those synapses firing :)

I have recently released porthole-0.6.0 final after several years of trying to get it finished. This last big update from -0.5.x was a major one, porthole's code was getting too large and unwieldy in many ways and was in need of a major slice and dice. This has sped things up significantly and reduced it's memory usage. Along the way I have been able to add more features and improve functionality of others. There is still far more that I want to achieve with the code and user interface, but that discussion will have to wait for other blog entries.

Take care...