[GSoC] MacPorts GUI (Pallet)

[Juan Germán Castañeda Echevarria]

<2010/3/24 Ankur Sethi <get.me.ankur at gmail.com>

> Hi,
>
>

Hi Ankur


> 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/),
>

You should try building the most recent version from: <
http://trac.macports.org/browser/branches/gsoc09-gui> since the MacPorts
Cocoa Framework had a lot of changes last year and the application was
completely rewritten.

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   outdated etc.)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
>

Some of your ideas were taken into account last year and I think they could
be implemented easily.


>
> I expect I'll want to hack on MacPorts.framework as well, but I haven't dug
> into the code yet.
>
>
Please do it, since you'll be using it, it may be lacking something that
you'll need. Please check my tasks log from last year <
http://juanger.heroku.com/gsoc-09> so you can read some more about the
current state of Pallet and the Framework.


> 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.
>
>
Yeah, the problem is that it tries to build the old Pallet, we should update
the portfile too.


> 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)
> _______________________________________________
> macports-dev mailing list
> macports-dev at lists.macosforge.org
> http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-dev
>



-- 
Ash Mac durbatulûk, ash Mac gimbatul, ash Mac thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi
krimpatul.
Juanger. http://xocoruby.blogspot.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/attachments/20100326/0b991d64/attachment.html>