Re: status of gnome-apt
On Sun, 12 Sep 1999, Othmar Pasteka wrote:
>
> can you give a statement about gnome-apt? is it being developed? is it
> on hold? so a status would be nice in many ways. on #debian-devel the
> people actually don't know the exact status of it. so please clear up
> this point.
>
It is being developed, but slowly right now. Help would be welcome.
I have lots of projects and unfortunately gnome-apt isn't the most
important one for now.
I've gotten and applied some patches for a nice sources.list setup wizard
and editor, but the libapt-pkg code (I believe the relevant file is
sourcelist.cc) to allow saving the sources.list hasn't been written yet.
The big job to finish gnome-apt is a tree widget for the main tree view.
The standard Gtk ones just don't work for a variety of reasons. A good
tree widget is about 10,000 lines of difficult-to-write code, I believe.
This is a solid few weeks of full-time work and I haven't had time to do
it. I have spent a few weekends trying to do it, but mostly I just decided
it wasn't a weekend hack. :-)
However, I am considering just changing the UI so the tree widget isn't
necessary; seems lame to have this bottleneck. I might do something more
gnorpm-looking, only with the nice Apt features. Not sure.
Two things that are _really_ needed to make gnome-apt nice are
user-friendly package names and package categories. The package categories
now are just a way to organize the ftp site; we need packages to be in
multiple categories, and we need user-readable category names. So for
example gmc would be in "GNOME Applications" and "File Managers". We also
need user-friendly package names, like "GNOME File Manager" instead of
"gmc" and "Magic Point" instead of "mgp". Hopefully someone will ram these
features through the bureaucracy very soon. If you wanted to be extra-cool
you could somehow make an icon for each package available to gnome-apt.
Anyway it is pretty hard to make gnome-apt user friendly without these
changes (I noticed that Corel's package tool screenshot seems to think
these features exist, but they are either implementing them themselves or
in for a rude surprise).
Oh, and I was also thinking that a "interesting to end users" flag in
packages would be nice, basically this would hide all libraries and let
Apt magically deal with them.
There are lots of other TODO items on the gnome-apt home page... I do my
best to be responsive to bug reports, questions, and patches, even though
I don't have time to move things forward rapidly right now.
If people are interested I could pop on to #debian-devel at some point and
discuss things.
Thanks,
Havoc
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