GSoC idea: MacPorts GUI

[Anders F Björklund]

Rainer Müller wrote:

> What I always wanted to have was to differenciate between command line
> tools, graphical applications and libraries. We could add specific
> secondary categories for these. Then the GUI could filter out libraries
> and present applications only - as that is what the user usally want to
> install. That would be more like MacPorts Store.

You could take a look at the Ubuntu Software Centre,
if you want to present "applications" differently...

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoftwareCenterFAQ

There is a project to make it more "generic", although
it's highly focused on .desktop files (i.e. not .app):

http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/AppStream


Anyway, what it does is to show the "application icon"
and then connect to a server to get screenshots/reviews.
So you'll need some code to extract/format those icons,
and then a network infrastructure for the "social" stuff ?

If you use PackageKit on your FreeBSD desktop, you will
already have integration of the icons and portupgrade...
Including the security classifications from "portaudit",
and the PackageKit graphic interface for KDE and GNOME:

http://www.algonet.se/~afb/freebsd/packagekit/packagekit-freebsd.png
http://www.algonet.se/~afb/freebsd/packagekit/kpackagekit-freebsd.png

It was easier to do it for FreeBSD than for Darwin, due to
Ruby rather than Tcl and that the DBUS/*Kit support existed.


But there is no reason why this couldn't be added to Pallet,
and one could also modify the GUI a bit to include binaries ?

http://trac.macports.org/wiki/MacPortsGUI GSoC2009
http://trac.macports.org/wiki/MacPortsGUI_GSoC2010_Improvement

I'm not sure what features are included in the MPWA service,
but maybe it too could be extended beyond port submission etc.

http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2007-May/001620.html
http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/contrib/mpwa/doc/design.txt

--anders