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On Tue, 2011-03-22 at 00:39 +0100, Michael Seifert wrote: |
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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 and |
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> would like to discuss some general things. More specific, I am 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 skills |
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> to be quite well. The point is that java is not part of a minimal gentoo |
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> system, whereas Python is. I would not have problems with Python, 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 would |
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> you rather like to have a Python based one or even some other language? |
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> And finally, how much time do you think will it cost to work through 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 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 needed. |
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Adding an anonymous data upload should not be difficult. So far I have |
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only been adding report types for problems users have run into. It 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 there |
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is anything needed from there (the reason I got involved in gentoolkit |
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coding). |
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I don't think a gui would be needed, but rather webapp interfaces to the |
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data gathered. Most of the devs are cli die hards, so a simple 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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|
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I would think the main portion of this project would be the database and |
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webapp query tools. Potential controversy aside, I would also think 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 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 upload |
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(for ex: pkgname, query #, possibly a bug #) no executable code. |
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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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Brian Dolbec <brian.dolbec@×××××.com> |