Re: [gentoo-osx] Followup to: The road ahead?

> > In fact, both. the first step would obviously be to build some basic GUI
> > around some interesting console applications.

> Like?  What kinds of applications are you thinking of here?  Just help
> me with ideas here, because I wouldn't see the use of a GUI wrapper for
> sed.  A GUI for pdflatex on the other hand is nice, but already exists
> (TeXshop).

I agreeg TeX is too complicated for my ideas, and grep is not really
useful. At least currently I don't see no way to implement OpenStep
services via Renaissance , which would change this.

Applications I would like to GUIfy include
- wget (downloaders are useful outside outomated scripts, too)
- WordNet resp. queequeg
- image to vector applications like autotrace resp. potrace

More complex GUIs I could imagine e.g for
- ImageMagick

(the latter would need a new kind of GUI, not so much form based, more
task based - you could have a list of taks, where you could e.g add a task
like "resize" or "reduce colours".
The given task list could be applied to one or more images, in some kind
of "batch mode operation"

> > The next step would be to implement Gento specific backends, for querying
> > the Gentoo database and installing / deinstalling / reinstalling
packages.
> > This could be implemented by calling Gentoo scripts, or a C / Python /
> > whatever level, as soon it is available.

> Interesting at this point may be extending/porting the GUI around
> libconf, a Gentoo-ish project by dams.  But that is only one of course.
> If I recall correctly there is some daft portage GUI as well now, but I
> think something like FinkCommander would look better (although
> FinkCommander is anything but intuitive).

Thats way I would like to retain a Gentoo User Interface until later.
Basically I could see three possible GUIs
- a form based GUI around emerge commands, in a complex multi-tab dialog
- a simple list where you can see the list of latest ebuild changes,
something like "keep your system uptodate"
- a complex application with multiple buttons, lists, text entries where
you can see a see all ebuild and their metadata (version, licence, USE
flags...)
  Something like a rich client application for packages.gentoo.org, with
the added functionality to start a emerge, emerge -C, emerge -u for the
selected packages

The last two GUIs you can see in some apt frontends, like e.g in Ubuntu
(written in C / Gtk)

I have never seen FinkCommander

> > The advantage against the current manual installation would be that you
> > can rely on the Gentoo package management facilities, which I came to
> > miss after my last experiments. Things like automatic version updates,
> > dependency management, the possibility to actual unistall stuff....

> Maybe I misunderstand you here, but what were your last experiments?  As
> far as I know, Portage can do updates, dependency management and
> uninstall packages.  What would you like to add here?

I don't intend to criticize portage her, on the contrary. Gentoo is a
shining example for dependency management done right ;)
But because some applications I played around lately either were not
available in Gentoo (Renaissance framework for OSX, py2app, Python wrapper
for Objective C), or were not really useful (I tried a GUI TeX frontend,
where I needed to install a LateX distribution, where I could choose
between fink, darwin ports and some tool called iInstaller, Gentoo was not
supported)

For the former I had to resort to .mpkgs, .dmgs with readmes to copy some
files to /System/Library, or downright hand crafted python install
scripts.

All of these way have no idea about having a running, maintainable system,
with components which can depend upon, and which can be removed.

Regards
Dirk

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