[GSoC] MacPorts GUI (Pallet)

[Ankur Sethi]

Hi,

I'm (so far) a hobbyist Cocoa programmer. I'm interested in hacking on
Pallet as a GSoC project this summer.

I spent the morning playing with Pallet (built from
http://svn.macosforge.org/repository/macports/users/rhwood/Pallet/),
and I came up with a short list of ideas:

- Queue operations instead of performing them right away.
- Improve the information display.
    - Location of installed ports
    - Installed files
    - Dependents and dependencies
- Browse by category and pseudo-portnames (all, installed,
   outdated etc.)
- Show installation progress in UI (the same steps that show up in the
   CLI, with optional verbose output of the build progress).
- Configure MacPorts from the GUI (the options listed in macports.conf,
  plus Pallet itself).
- Archive ports, unarchive and install archived ports.
- Minor features: show homepage, show portfile, show checksum etc.

Additionally, I found these ideas on the Wiki:
- Variants selection
- Growl support
- Error alerts

I expect I'll want to hack on MacPorts.framework as well, but I haven't dug
into the code yet.

I also ran into some problems:
- The description text on the bottom of the screen sometimes gets garbled.
   I haven't been able to reliably reproduce this.
- Clicking 'Install' or Cmd+I does not actually install the port. Is this a
   known bug or am I doing something wrong when I build Pallet?
- The version of Pallet in the MacPorts repository crashes on startup. I
   could find a related ticket on Trac, so this looks like a known bug.

Even though I spend a lot of time on the commandline, I prefer using
GUI tools for some tasks. So this project will be as much for myself
as for Terminal.app-phobic Mac users.

I've been tinkering with Cocoa for about an year now, and I'm
currently working on a music manager for OS X
(http://github.com/goonj/goonj/). I've previously worked on a
full-text indexing daemon for Haiku (http://haiku-os.org) as part of
the Haiku Code Drive (a program similar to GSoC that runs more or less
parallel to it). I don't have experience with Tcl, but I can pick it
up before the program starts (I already love and program Python).

I'd love to hear what the mentors have to say :)

-- 
Ankur Sethi
(GeneralMaximus on IRC and elsewhere)