Portage gui?

GummyGum173 · n00b Joined: 09 Apr 2014 Posts: 50

Hi,

I want to practise my C++, and have decided to write a portage gui front-end (first using Qt, later maybe GTK aswell), as I've seen no updated, sane-looking front end yet, and I want to include other stuff like gentoolkit (equery and euse integration) as well as overlays and etc.

I wanted to ask 3 things:
1. Is there anything very similar to my project that has been released / is being worked on that I am not aware of? (I'm talking about very recent uploads, like 1 month ago and stuff)
2. May I use a name like portage-qt or portage-gtk or do I have to come up with a name that is different from portage?
3. Where can I get future help on adding my package to the official gentoo repo and how to maintain it etc?

Thanks alot!

lexflex · Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 7:16 pm Post subject:

Hi,

Maybe it is just me, but I am wondering what it would look like and what extra it would bring.
( apart from the fact that I tend to sync and upgrade from the commandline for convenience anyway, usually from some remote machine).

I.e., the output of emerge is quite complex (with blocks and all), would it just post the same output as text in some nicely decorated window ?
And instead of pressing "y" for yes, there would be a button to go on ?

Ok, search functions could be better, so including EIX-like features can help in some way.

Just wondering what your plan would be :-)

Alex.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 7:28 pm Post subject:

GummyGum173,

Have you tried porthole ?

Maybe it would be better to contribute to an existing project than to start your own?
I don't know anything about it, other than it exists.
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GummyGum173 · n00b Joined: 09 Apr 2014 Posts: 50

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 8:34 pm Post subject:

GummyGum173,

Whatever scratches your itch.
Good luck with your project.
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those that have never had a hard drive fail.

emc · Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 9:47 pm Post subject:

Check out Kuroo it was qt based.

dol-sen · Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 12:26 am Post subject:

Also, join #gentoo-guis IRC channel. You will find galiven Kuroo's developer, myself for porthole, gentoolkit, layman, portage,...
There are also some others. It is always nice to be able to chat with other guis developers to help things along.
We also have a gentoo-guis mail list (very quiet).

There have been some other portage guis over the years too. kportagetray was a QT/pyQT based app.
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Porthole, the Portage GUI frontend irc@freenode: #gentoo-guis, #porthole, Blog
layman, gentoolkit, CoreBuilder, esearch...

emc · Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 9:43 am Post subject:

IMHO emerge/portage is one of only cli tool, it's easier to control it and use it. But definitely GUI can increase gentoo community, it my be easier for new comers and can cause people can actually stay in community. So, if any GUI reincarnate I will definitely try and test. So, I encourage any dev to start over!

Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 8:17 pm Post subject:

The Portage GUIs I know of are: Kuroo, Porthole, Portato and Himerge.

Development of Portato was discontinued a long time ago and it does not work with Portage currently: http://necoro.eu/portato/

I've never used Himerge, but it doesn't look like it has been developed since 2009: http://freecode.com/projects/himerge

I'm not sure about the current state of Porthole, but its last update was in July 2014 so it looks like it's still in development: http://porthole.sourceforge.net/

I used to use Kuroo, which I found quite good (nicely designed UI), and a handy GUI browser for Portage packages. The original Kuroo is unmaintained, according to its Web site http://kuroo.org/ but a fork Kuroo4 seems to still be in development (its last update was in September 2014): http://sourceforge.net/projects/kuroo/
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galiven · Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 9:09 pm Post subject: Kuroo4

Fitzcarraldo gave a pretty good summary. Porthole is the best maintained GUI, and as far as I can tell portato and Himerge are dead. I keep Kuroo4 limping along in the sourceforge project, trying to make sure it still builds with KDE and QT updates and changes to emerge output. It has a lot of the features you're specifically thinking about:

It used to have a nice dependency view, but newer EAPIs made that really complicated so it doesn't work now. dol-sen has been doing a lot of good work on making an API for portage access that would fix a lot of the problems Kuroo4 has with parsing emerge output and overlay support, but migrating to that is too big a task for me to take on in my free time.

Anyways, I encourage you to take a look at the source code, maybe install it and poke around a bit in the UI too. I'd be happy to answer any questions that I actually know the answer to. And join us in #gentoo-guis for quick responses.

C5ace · Posted: Tue Mar 17, 2015 3:26 pm Post subject: Portage GUI

I have been using Suse and Opensuse for may years. Tried Debian, Fedora, Ubunto. Now user Gentoo on Deskops and OpenSuse on Notebooks. From all of them, I find OpenSuse YAST2 (X) and YAST (Ncurses) the best GUI to install, configure, manage etc. GUI. It takes me about 10 minutes at the keyboard to install and configure OpenSuse including Xfce. OpenOffice, Firewall, etc. on a Notebook.

It would be very nice to rewrite the YAST suite of packages to work with Gentoo. YAST is Open Source written in Ruby.

Install OpenSuse and play with the installer, configuration and management units to get some inspirations.

emc · Posted: Tue Mar 17, 2015 4:38 pm Post subject:

Taking into account that gentoo is so different from 'normal' binary distro, I thing the only GUI from YAST can be reuse or what is more true rewrote gentoo GUI to looks similar as YAST