Re: [gentoo-soc] Graphical portage front-end

[Brian Dolbec]

On Sat, 2010-03-20 at 11:38 -0400, Eric Thibodeau wrote:
> In short, I agree with Tucold. Some sort of X-independant but aware
> (thinking curses here) front end to portage + glsa-checks + ability to
> select another install root (and throw in neworked eclean while at it)
> come to mind... I could see this as a useful front end to portage for,
> ie: managing multiple system images on say, the master node of a
> cluster ;) If one wants to be really neat feature to such an
> interface, the ability to install the same package onto multiple roots
> simultaneously.
>
> ...my 2c.
>
> Eric Thibodeau
>

There have been attempts at an ncurses frontend before.  One was by a
porthole dev that was trying to implement a simplified version of it.
Unfortunately he did not get far into the project when work got it the
way and he needed to withdraw from all other projects.  The more recent
one I am aware of was by a former portage dev "genone".  From what I
gathered he was unable to find a decent ncurses toolkit to work with
that would not require a great deal of custom work to implement it.  I
have not heard anything more for some time now.

As for networked GUI ability.  Several years ago one of the porthole
devs came up with an experimental ability for porthole to connect to
remote hosts.  At the time there was too much else to do and work on,
not to mention the security concerns that would need to be properly
addressed.  I have always kept that that ability in my mind as something
to add in.  In recent times python3k brings with it the native ability
to import python modules from remote hosts using ssh.  That will make
secure remote connections possible and I think much easier to implement.
But that too would also be better to implement if portage had a proper
public API to use.  Adding the ability to push it to multiple systems
simultaneously should not be that much additional difficulty.  Again I
welcome some help in implementing that. 

As for other gentoolkit and portage apps, I have gotten involved in the
recent gentoolkit development in order to make the python based
utilities useable/importable directly into other python apps.  Namely to
create plugin's for porthole so it could gain access to the code used to
produce the info output and operations it performed with out resorting
to parsing terminal output, something which breaks often with version
upgrades, prone to parsing errors, limited flexibility.  A networked
eclean is now natively possible with only minor additional changes
(without running multiple instances, one for each host).  I am also
currently working on a plugin type system for emaint that should make it
easier to add/remove modules to as well as make it easier to implement
arch or other specific install needs  code changes without the need to
reconfigure or modify the interface or the command used to carry out the
task desired.  Hopefully the change will be accepted and implemented. 

-- 
Brian Dolbec <brian.dolbec@×××××.com>