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