Re: gdselect alpha 3 [libapt]
On Nov 24, Havoc Pennington decided to present us with:
>
> On Tue, 24 Nov 1998, Lalo Martins wrote:
(...)
> > Havoc, are you working on this? If you want to concentrate on
> > the dselect-like tree portion, I wouldn't mind taking over that
> > part. I have some neat ideas about it. My vision is a
> > GNOME/CORBA widget "gdeb" or something, that:
(...)
>
> This sounds like overkill for gnome-apt. All I need is a routine:
>
> stuff_info_on_this_deb_in_text_widget(GtkText* text,
> SomeKindOfHandle* package);
>
> For now we can just stuff the raw text, eventually it can stuff it and
> also set some bold and color styles so things look nice.
I disagree. I've been doing my homework yesterday and yes, ORBit
would be a lot of overkill. But a custom GTK widget sounds like
the way to go. Just dumping the headers data to a text widget
would seriously hurt user-friendliness which is one of the
reasons to get rid of dselect, right?
I made a prototype with glade today, there are screenshots and
code at http://master.debian.org/~lalo/gdeb
Basically it has a header and a notebook widget; the header has
package name, version and short description, plus some kind of
indication (maybe red or italic text) if the package is
Essential. The notebook has three pages, "Info", "Relationships"
and "Special". The whole widget has two "user modes" selected in
the _new function, "normal" and "advanced"; "normal" is
user-friendly (you don't have to know about headers) and
"advanced" is just a nicely-formatted dump of the headers.
Pages/headers:
Info: extended Description, Essential, Section, Priority, Size,
Installed-Size, Maintainer
Relationships: Provides, Pre-Depends, Depends, Recommends,
Suggests, Conflicts
Special: Status and installed version (if not provided, I'd like
to query those from libdpkg), Architeture, Source, Replaces,
buttons to inspect the control information file (postinst,
postrm, conffiles, shlibs, etc), button to inspect contents
(dpkg-deb -c) and button to install.
Now check all these headers and see how user-UNfriendly it would
be to just dump them to a text widget :-) of course is a
possible temporary solution as any other, but it's not what we
want in the long run is it? Now check the package listings made
by mkbroch in http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable and tell
me if it isn't a lot better.
> The main thing I need to know is how to get SomeKindOfHandle and how to
> get from that to the string to stuff, Jason said he was working on this.
> I assume it will be in apt-pkg so you could also use it in a 'gdeb'
> program (which does sound like a good idea).
SomeKindOfHandle would be the header data; you would fetch these
from the "available" file, which I suppose gdselect already
parses. Of course, to just dump stuff to a text widget, you
could just as well simply do it - you already have it in string
form.
Then again check the page I made in master (URL above). In
usability terms, check the screenshots. In programability terms,
check the creation functions in the page. And tell me what you
like better, this or a text widget :-)
And BTW... this may sound like a lot of work, but not really; a
working "1.0beta" version of the widget would take a week or so.
[]s,
|alo
+----
--
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