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.

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.

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...