Arnaud's blog

These last weeks, Enrico and me have worked on a GUI frontend for pmnew. At the moment, the prototype is limited to the task of finding new packages to install.

The goal of pmnew-gui is to have every little detail designed to be as smart as possible: for example, the list of packages shows at the top the packages that the system thinks you are interested in having comparing your system to thousands other systems.

Screenshots

http://people.debian.org/~enrico/2007-02/sshot-startup.png
http://people.debian.org/~enrico/2007-02/sshot-audio.png
http://people.debian.org/~enrico/2007-02/sshot-games.png

Get it

bzr branch \
http://people.debian.org/~enrico/2007-02/pmnew-gui/

Setup

The README gives some details about the setup. In short you will have to do the following steps:

apt-get install python-debian python-deb822 python-xapian \
python-apt python-glade2 python-gtk2
./update-data
./pmnew-gui

It works better if you have a network connection, and if you have popularity-contest installed and running.

Feel free to send us feedbacks about the GUI.

Links

• "The original brain dump"
• "The commandline draft"
• "Various ideas on improving package managers"

These days, i have worked a lot for the SoC in order to define the design of the web and mail interfaces, helped by Raphael Hertzog. Everything has been committed to the arch repository of the project. Now, i will post news about the progress of the SoC on my blog and on the soc-coordination mailing list.

Web interface

I have begun by the tree of the web interface. One of the feature of wotomae is to be editable by everybody. However, we must have an administrator's group for a tracker (for mass bug filling or the blacklist). I have worked with Raphael for writing mockups intended to give an outline of the web interface, and especially to detail the features of the most important pages. It is possible to define custom fields (upstream version...) where the datas are given using the mail interface by external scripts or by the user if it can be done easily. It is also possible to define visual preferences on custom fields.

The implementation of the web interface will be written with Turbogears, which has interesting features, like :

• Internationalization
• Form validation
• Tests

Finally, I chose ZODB. Because the accounts database has to be share with other interface, which won't necessary use python, a secure XML-RPC API will be written for accessing the accounts' datas.

Mail interface

The goal is to obtain a flexible interface, allowing to make some tasks easier. At the moment, these commandes have been defined (some examples are availabe on the wiki):

• tracker for choosing a tracker where the commands will apply.
• assign adds packages and bugs to a previous selected tracker.
• lock assigns a package to a developper.
• setfield apply a field to a package.
• addcomment add a comment to a specific package.
• thanks ends the commands' list.

Any comments about the design are obviously welcome.

These days, i have worked on planet debian package. At first glance, it seemed easy to package but actually it wasn't, mainly due to debconf and FHS problems. A package is temporarily available at this address. The main features of the package is the usage of debconf to configure cron interval and also handles /etc/planet.conf for main options.

Any comments are obviously welcome.

I was really glad to be accepted for Google Summer of Code. My (accepted) proposal was on DWTT (Distribution Wide Tracker Tool) and CRMI (Collaborative Repository of Meta-Informations about source packages) mentored by Raphaël Hertzog.

I have worked a bit on DWTT today and have written a webpage on the Debian wiki about the project. I'm currently pondering which is the best python framework to use :

• Cherrypy/ZODB
• Turbogears/SQLObject.

Having recently used ZODB (this means Zope Object DataBase) in a project, I think it's a great object database because it's very tightly integrated with Python, which makes it easy to use for programmers. ZODB is python-specific though, whereas SQLObject backends (for MySQL and Postgres) makes it language-independent.

In the next weeks i will work on DWTT design. Until june 16, I have a lot of school work, which is why I won't have enough free time to work on the project, hence a slowdown in the project.