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... :)

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

I finally got around to another quick blog post. I have been able to get some coding work done on porthole again. I hope to make a few improvements to existing features, nothing major. Then I'll get a new release out. After that I'll continue to produce a new plug-in for gentoolkit and another one for layman.

On the gentoolkit front I've just coded up another small analyse module "packages" to print out all the installed packages and the use flag settings. It is not 100% complete yet. I did this one for likewhoa who needed it for the livedvd release info. With some additional feedback from him, I am going to add csv output so that it can be used to accumulate stats on user's systems when submitted to an accumulation site. There currently isn't one being done anymore, likewhoa is planning to add one.

On the layman front, I've been doing some more coding. I've created new cli backend code that uses the new api I created. It has sped a few things up, and I've added a little more code to the api which has helped to make it more universal and a little faster.

Well, I haven't totally dropped off the map :)

I finally got around to fixing xfce to work again. I had to drop a bunch of my hidden config files to get it working. I don't know what the corruption was, but meh.

So I have had to start rebuilding a new desktop, so I went with the old time industrial theme which seems to go with warehouse 13, so I've catured some w-13 screenshots to use as the background. It is coming along nicely. Now if someone artistic could create a w-13 icon theme that would be great :D

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.

status update

I've been a little busy lately and haven't had much time for a new post. I have the eclean re-write working good and have several unit tests for it, but to test it all would mean having 10 times the code just to run the tests on the real code. You will be able to try out the re-write in the gentookit-0.3.0_rc10 release coming out soon. For cleaning the packages directory it now relies on emaint from portage to fix the Packages index file. For now it runs it in a sub-process from eclean, but I hope to get some changes approved to emaint, so that eclean will be able to use it directly. It will then not disrupt the output from eclean like it will for now. Gentoolkit is now going to be python-3 capable and will require a minimum of python-2.6 to work correctly. Also, for those not following the gentoo-soc mail list, an idea for a network enabled eclean version was brought up that would be useful for central NFS servers serving the distfiles or packages directories. With that i have been able to deduce that it will not take much more work to add shared disfiles and/or packages ecleaning ability. So perhaps look for that feature in the near future, perhaps in gentoolkit-0.3.1.



It also looks like my knee injury is nearly healed up and I may be returning to work soon. A good thing about that is it might help to shed the 20+lbs of weight I put on since the injury.

I also need to code some additional modules for the new analyse utility I started, along with a major backend re-structuring for porthole. I've been also asked to clarify some of the analyse descriptions, abilities that I posted about earlier. So look for that this week. That's it for now.