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On Mon, 21 Mar 2011 17:51:58 -0700, Brian Dolbec |
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<brian.dolbec@×××××.com> wrote: |
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> On Tue, 2011-03-22 at 00:39 +0100, Michael Seifert wrote: |
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>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- |
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>> Hash: SHA1 |
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>> |
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>> Hello Gentoo team, |
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>> |
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>> I am interested in taking part in this year's Google Summer of Code |
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>> and |
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>> would like to discuss some general things. More specific, I am |
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>> talking |
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>> about Christopher Harvey's idea to design an application that raises |
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>> statistics on the installed packages on a system (see [1]). |
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>> |
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>> Let me explain my issue: |
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>> In the first place, I am a Java developer and I consider my Java |
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>> skills |
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>> to be quite well. The point is that java is not part of a minimal |
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>> gentoo |
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>> system, whereas Python is. I would not have problems with Python, |
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>> but I |
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>> would have to learn the API of a GUI toolkit (preferably PyQt). |
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>> What is your opinion: Would you be okay with a Java application or |
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>> would |
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>> you rather like to have a Python based one or even some other |
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>> language? |
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>> And finally, how much time do you think will it cost to work through |
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>> the |
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>> Qt API? |
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>> |
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>> |
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> |
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> Well, a good deal of the info gathering methods are already coded in |
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> python (by me) and installed on many users systems already, soon to |
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> be |
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> even more as gentoolkit-0.3.0 final is about to be released. |
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> |
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> Have a look at the analyse module. It is designed for accessing the |
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> installed package database and reporting/repairing things about it. |
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> There is room for many more types of reports depending what is |
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> needed. |
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> Adding an anonymous data upload should not be difficult. So far I |
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> have |
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> only been adding report types for problems users have run into. It |
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> has |
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> USE flags and keywords reports so far. It has an api to use so as to |
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> not need terminal output parsing to get the relevant data out of it. |
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> Also so does most of equery and eclean have usable api's now (if |
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> there |
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> is anything needed from there (the reason I got involved in |
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> gentoolkit |
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> coding). |
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Glad to hear gentoolkit has an API. |
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> |
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> I don't think a gui would be needed, but rather webapp interfaces to |
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> the |
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> data gathered. Most of the devs are cli die hards, so a simple |
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> command |
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> line interface to query the central database should be primary. I |
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> believe it would be more widely used for the ebuilds they maintain. A |
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> browser could be used to connect to it and get graphs, etc. for more |
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> elaborate info displays. |
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I had envisioned the webapp as being the main frontend, but since users |
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would probably feel more comfortable with entering useful data via a |
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simple and minimal gui on the client side. |
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> |
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> I would think the main portion of this project would be the database |
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> and |
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> webapp query tools. Potential controversy aside, I would also think |
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> you |
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> should add a mechanism for a dev to trigger a simple query for people |
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> having a cat/pkg-ver installed to optionally fill in a few questions |
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> regarding an pkg's stability,... all anonymously. Those queries |
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> could |
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> be generic in nature and come with the data gathering tool, that way |
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> only a simple small string need be downloaded at the time of data |
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> upload |
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> (for ex: pkgname, query #, possibly a bug #) no executable code. |
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Agreed, maybe to avoid making the program annoying it could only run |
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when the user asks it to. |
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> |
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> So I would concentrate your research and proposal efforts on the |
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> database and webapps. |
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|
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I'm not a developer, so I don't think I can mentor this project even |
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though I had the original idea. As of now, as far as I know this project |
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has no mentor. Brian, as the author of gentoolkit and having such |
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similar ideas for this project as me I'd be happy to see you mentor it |
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if you want to. |
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|
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-Chris |