Re: [gentoo-dev] A GUI to help with ebuilds ?

[Karl Trygve Kalleberg]

Hi.

I'm a toolite. I like tools. 

We have a tool called ebuilder (dev-util/ebuilder), written and maintained
by Zach Forrest <zach@××××××××××××××.ca>. You should have a look at it and
talk to Zach about the possibility of adding a GUI on top of its design
(it's written in Bash, so just using the code won't be too easy).

I like ebuilder. It makes some things very easy. The very nice thing about
it, imho, is that I can use to add ebuilds quick on my server, because
it's running text-mode (and hence nicely over ssh).

However, if I as a developer were to come with one wish at this point, I'd
like to have two-part tool which:

1) Automatically packaged entries from 
    themes.freshmeat.org,
    themes.kde.org,
    galeon.sf.net/themes
    other, application-specific sites for skins as ebuilds
2) A graphical theme-browser, which showed available themes in Portage,
   displaying a thumbsized screenshot (and optionally a 800x600
   screenshot) of each theme, and allowed the user to install them
   (by firing off Portage in the background).

In short, I'd like some auxiliary (development and user) tools to extend
Portage to handle themes. Afaik, _no_ other distro has anything like this.
Even in KDE3 and GNOME2, you are expected to download the tarball, extract
it into ~/.foo/themes, tweak your ~/.foorc and do all other kinds of
nastyness to get it work.

Portage has the power to help out with a lot of this, but if we are to
keep up with the pace of new themes, we will most likely want to have
tools to do the packaging.


At any rate, don't let my off-track comments about my personal desires
derail you from making a slick developer tool for making ebuilds. It's
just that I know from experience that most ebuilds are hand-written for
the reason that most build systems have one (or usually, A LOT) of quirks.

And then we use syntax-highlighting, hippie-expand and all that ;P


Kind regards,

Karl T