[gentoo-soc] Re: Portage public API and web GUI proposal

[Brian Dolbec]

On Thu, 20 Mar 2014 13:31:06 +0100
Maciej Wójcik <w8jcik@×××××.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am interested in participation in GSoC 2014. Using Gentoo for many
> years on many machines I am still feeling a bit uncomfortable using
> portage CLI. I know that there are some technical difficulties
> regarding its performance and I am not blaming anyone. I am also not
> planning to change distribution anyway, but I think that it would be
> great to improve somehow the overall user experience.
>
> Not feeling talented or motivated enough to revolutionize Portage I
> still believe that it can be achieved by other means. Being almost
> sure that such projects are not welcome in the community, especially
> on GSoC it is hard for me to say it :) but I would like to make a web
> GUI for Portage.
>
> Doing some research, looking for existing GUI's and trying to find
> out why I am not using any of them I have noticed few things. They
> are not popular or being less polite, there are useless for me,
> because they are focused on browsing portage database. They do not
> help in the installation process itself and they do not make make
> switching flags and keywords easier, but more complicated instead.
>
> I still believe that GUI provides more ways to organize and interact
> with the data. Creating this kind of tool as a web application would
> make it independent from Xorg and enable it for use in headless
> environments.
>
> Implementing the idea I would like to focus on just a few things and
> do it as best as possible. The features would be
>  - a queue with jobs
>  - graphical presentation of packages to install, allowing to set the
> flags and unmasking packages just by clicking
>  - a fully functional terminal (tty.js) presenting additional output
> from jobs
>  - graphical presentation of all customization made to system in
> terms of flags, keywords, masks, unmasks, licenses and world
> installed packages allowing to modify them
>  - possibility to close the web page in any moment not interrupting
> the process
>
> Not implementing repository browsing at all because websites like
> http://gpo.zugaina.org do their job well.
>
> I have an experience in making dynamic web applications in HTML5 and
> node.js and also an experience in C language, programming
> microcontrollers on daily basis.
>

I started something similar a few years back.  Specifically for a test
build environment and prefix installs.   It does however do have
package browsing built-in. Not complete for all the details yet, but it
was started. [1]


> I would like to use Portage public API in this project eventually
> finishing or patching it if needed. I am interested especially in
> your opinion, because I believe you are mentoring its development.
> Could you provide me with some details of its progress, issues and
> plans? Finally if I will conclude that I am able to finish it, would
> you like to became my mentor this summer?
>
> If so I would of course focus on the API itself, treating described
> project as a side one or an example of API use if the timetable of
> GSoC will allow it.
>
> Best regards,
> Maciej Wojcik, Poland

Corebuilder used the newly split out backend from porthole which was
also working to make both pkgcore and portage API's more comaptible
with each other.  It was something both Zac and Brian agreed needed to
happen. [2]

I was using that backend to work on portage's public_api to be more
compatible. [3]

I would welcome someone to continue on where I left off. 
But there is very little time to polish up a good proposal, so get to it!
The deadline is tomorrow.


[1] https://github.com/dol-sen/CoreBuilder
[2] http://sourceforge.net/p/porthole/code/ci/dev_api/tree/pmbackends/
[3] http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/public_api
-- 
Brian Dolbec <dolsen>