GSOC09 MacPorts GUI

Tue Jul 7 23:41:50 PDT 2009

Hi Juan,

That looks very promising.  I'm excited about this work.  I do have a  
few questions.

1) Do you plan to support categories?  Ports list categories that they  
belong to, so it would be nice to have a browsing option that allows  
us to "expand" categories.

2) How are variants handled?  Do you have a gui way to edit $prefix/ 
etc/macports/variants.conf?  What about per-port variants at install  
time?

3) You said, "I’m working into getting that separate process to be  
part of the Framework and also make it send notifications back to the  
Framework to know the progress of the port command being run." ... I'm  
curious what level or notification you are designing.  It would  
probably be nice to have a window that shows a general progress bar  
for the current port/stage... but for debugging purposes, it would be  
helpful if this could be expanded via "Details" button or similar to  
show the verbose or debug output.

4) Do you plan to have a preferences interface to common $prefix/etc/ 
macports/macports.conf options?

Thanks,
Jeremy

On Jul 7, 2009, at 12:17, Juan Germán Castañeda Echevarria wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I’ve been very busy these days working in the GUI, I’ve learnt a lot  
> of
> things and first of all I want to thank my mentor, Georg Armah, for  
> teaching
> me a lot of things and being so patient with me. Also I’d like to  
> thank all
> the other mentors that have helped me on IRC (I should do that more!).
> Current Status
>
> Now is the time to introduce you my work. I’ve done the first  
> version of the
> MacPorts GUI application and this is what I have:
>
>   - Support for non-default MacPorts installation locations. (Via the
>   Preferences window)
>   - Basic and Advanced Search (currently can only search by port  
> name and
>   status, but this is easily extendible)
>   - Install, Uninstall, Upgrade port operations in background
>   - Sync and SelfUpdate in background
>
> What doesn’t work:
>
>   - Status field in ports table doesn’t change after install,  
> uninstall and
>   upgrade.
>
> What still needs to be implemented:
>
>   - Make the Framework use a separate process to perform port  
> commands (see
>   the Problems section below)
>   - Port info. This will be displayed like a quick look window.
>   - Progress notifications and cancel command. I’m thinking in  
> having this
>   as a activity window (Something like Safari’s downloads window)  
> and allow
>   the user to queue port commands to perform then sequentially.
>
> Installation
>
> To install it from source, you only have to checkout the gsoc09-gui  
> branch,
> and build the MPGUI Xcode project with the Debug-InstallMacPorts
> configuration<http://www.screencast.com/users/juanger/folders/Jing/media/01000c79-6663-486f-81d7-6ce56d12366a 
> >
>
> svn co http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/branches/gsoc09-gui
>
> That will build the MacPorts.framework, a MacPorts 1.8 unprivileged
> installation and selfupdate it.
>
> I also have included a binary version that should work out of the  
> box. To
> make it work I embedded the Framework in the application bundle but  
> we have
> planned that the Framework will be installed separately form the  
> application
> and will live in a Frameworks directory (in /Library or the per user
> ~/Library).
> Running
>
> The first time the application is run, the preferences window will  
> come out
> and you should set the Tcl installation path. Since the GUI is  
> tested with
> MacPorts 1.8, you can set it to the macports1.8/Library/Tcl directory
> created in the build directory if you built it from source. If  
> you’re using
> the binary version you can install an unprivileged macports (from  
> trunk),
> selfupdate it and test with it or use your /Library/Tcl installation  
> (this
> will work partially).
>
> Screenshot<http://www.screencast.com/users/juanger/folders/Jing/media/dbc07263-fe93-4015-aeed-6341b589dafc 
> >
>
> Since I'm having problems with my internet connection I haven't  
> tested it
> thoroughly, so If you encounter any problem, please let me know.
> Problems
>
> The main problem has been the multithreaded implementation because  
> for some
> reason (it is very difficult to debug) the destroot phase was  
> interrupted
> and the thread died when installing some ports (expat, libiconv,  
> pngcrush,
> …) that use xinstall with the ‘-W’ flag. After doing some tests we  
> found
> that when the port command was run in another process rather than in a
> secondary thread, it was smoothly completed.
>
> Then we opted to create a separate process to handle port commands  
> and made
> the GUI to communicate with it via distributed objects messaging.  
> This is
> the version you’ll test.
>
> Currently I’m working into getting that separate process to be part  
> of the
> Framework and also make it send notifications back to the Framework  
> to know
> the progress of the port command being run. This way it will be more
> transparent to the client (in this case the GUI, but it could be  
> something
> else) and the GUI implementation will be simpler.
> Final thoughts
>
> I hope to get a lot of feedback from you regarding the interface  
> design and
> also about how it is working now. I’m working to get a new version  
> of the
> Framework with the changes I explained in previous paragraphs by the
> beginning of the next week.
> -- 
> Ash Mac durbatulûk, ash Mac gimbatul, ash Mac thrakatulûk agh burzum- 
> ishi
> krimpatul.
> Juanger. http://xocoruby.blogspot.com
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