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"

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.

Any comments are obviously welcome.

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.