[GSoC-2010] MPWA

[Pratul Kalia]

Hello everyone

I've been doing some thinking about the Macports Web Application
(MPWA) idea for a couple of days. The original MPWA implementation was
done in Ruby on Rails 3 years ago. Unfortunately, that never got to be
implemented practically and hasn't been updated either. I had a talk
with Rainer and he said it wouldn't be particularly necessary to
"continue" this idea in Ruby or RoR. The original codebase was on RoR
1.2.3 anyway, long outdated.

While I'm not very sure about what all the community would need in the
web app, other than in interface to view details on ports and a
possible "online submission of new ports" method, I see 2 possible
approaches to the problem:
  - A separate web application running on web2py or Django
  - A Trac plugin (since ports already uses Trac for issue tracking)

A Django/web2py application would mean working on integrating with the
Trac install (for example, SSO). On the other hand, a Trac plugin
wouldn't offer that much flexibility but would make integration much
easier.

Here's my understanding of what this project would entail:
  - Help people add new ports easily, via an online submission form
(that generates a Portfile?)
  - Help know port information, like dependencies and versions
  - Possibly, integrate with a build script to auto test if ports
build successfully
  - Help port maintainers get updated comments/info/rating on their
ports from the users (an alternative to the mailing list)
  - Others?

I'm particularly interested in this idea, since I have strong prior
web development experience. I have been a steady contributor to the
Drupal project (I was a GSoC student with them in 2009), and right now
I'm working on an open source music player/manager (Mac only) with
some friends (http://github.com/goonj/goonj).

I hope an implementation of this idea works out practically, because I
truly see this improving the overall quality of the Macports
community. I will take feedback from the community before I actually
draft my proposal. I want to try bit of both the Trac and Django API
too.


Discussion time!
Thanks
Pratul

-- 
dum vivimus, vivamus
pratul == lut4rp
http://pratul.in