[GSoC] MacPorts GUI (Pallet)

[Joshua Root]

On 2010-3-24 20:43 , Ankur Sethi wrote:
> 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/),

That code is quite old, see
<http://trac.macports.org/browser/branches/gsoc09-gui> and
<http://trac.macports.org/wiki/MacPortsGUI> for the version that's been
worked on most recently. I'm not sure of the exact relationship between
the two, but if the older version has some bits that are better for some
reason, feel free to incorporate them.

> 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    outdated etc.)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.

All sounds fine.

> 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.

Yes, the framework likely needs updating to support new base features.
(I'm not sure how complete it was before, either.)

> 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 :)

Keep trying to grok the source as much as you can, and feel free to ask
any questions here or on IRC.

- Josh