SoC Idea

[Rainer Müller]

Hello,

On 2013-04-24 16:01, Justin Herald wrote:
> I am thinking about submitting a proposal for SoC and wanted to run the
> ideas by the mailing list.
> 
> I thought it kind of made sense to roll the ideas for (a) interactive
> mode, (b) package cleaning (reclaim disk space), and (c) shell
> environment integration into one proposal.  Of course, each would be
> it's own sub-project and one wouldn't rely on another.

That would be fine. Just make sure to structure each task accordingly
and assign the appropriate amount of time to each in your roadmap.

(a) Interactive execution

The idea on the wiki was that the Tcl libraries (mainly macports1.0)
used by the port command need to become aware of interactive execution.

Currently, we use ui_msg, ui_info, etc. to pass output to the port
command from the library. Similar, a callback could exist to get
feedback from the user in a standardized manner that could be used by
any client (both text and GUI). Such messages would be offerring a
yes/no question, or making a choice from a list of options (for example,
thinking of multiple matches during port activate).

Of course, port(1) should then offer a global flag for non-interactive
execution to be used by scripts or in automated tasks.


(b) Reclaim

This is an easy task and could be a good introduction into how the
internals of the port(1) client work. It's probably a good idea to do
that one first, without spending too much time on it before getting to
the others. So, I see kind of a connection between (a) and (b) and how
they could be arranged in one proposal to fit.


(c) Shell environment integration

This one has nothing to do with the others. What are your plans for this
task?  What are the use cases?


> Also, if there was interest in the community for it, and time allows
> (which I think it should), I thought a GUI for interactive mode might be
> interesting.

Not sure if you mean a full functional GUI for MacPorts by that. This
would definitely be a project on its own.

Rainer