GUI tool for packaging
This is an idea I've had knocking around for a while. Packaging is complex - there are lots of different tools and syntaxes you have to understand to do a good job of it - quilt, debhelper, watch files, etc. - along with specialist terminology. I know various CLI tools aim to simplify things, but not everything can be automated, and the tools end up with lots of options to learn about.
The upshot is that most open source developers rely on a relatively small number of specialist packagers to do the rather esoteric work of preparing Debian packages. To get this to scale, I think we need to encourage more upstreams to provide packaging - whether it's for inclusion in Debian, or to provide .deb packages themselves, like Google Chrome, MongoDB and Dropbox do.
In my opinion, the best way to do that is to build a GUI that holds the user's hand through the process of packaging, showing them the options available. It should be particularly useful for occasional packagers who don't want to remember a load of commands and options.
Ultimately, I envisage a kind of packaging IDE. But the bit I picked to implement first is a wizard to create a watch file. The user can select popular sites like Github or PyPI, enter a couple of details, and a (hopefully correct) watchfile is generated.
Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/YM2LT.png
Code: https://bitbucket.org/takluyver/packagebench/src
I imagine wizards like this could be a large part of this tool, for tasks like "Add a documentation package" or "Make DEP-8 tests".
So, I'd like to know:
- Do you think this is worth spending time on? Bear in mind it's primarily aimed at new & occasional packagers, not experts who already know the tools.
- Is there already anything like this?
- Would you be interested in helping to develop it?
Of course, this should be useful for any packages, not just Python-based ones. But I thought I'd float the idea here first, to get some feedback before I take it any further.
Thanks,
Thomas
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