Gentoo 2006.0 Feature Requests

chrisaw · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2005 Posts: 20 Location: /mnt/gentoo

Well someone had to start it

Did a quick search and got no hits so here i am. It's brilliant that you guys are sorting portage out to be much faster =) Always thought the old file method is a bit obselete for gentoo for nevertheless easier to manage most would argue. So, my requests are:-

* An official frontend to portage.

... I know Gentoo is all about the power of the console and i am a console freak I must confess. But i was using Debian for a few days and the frontend for the package system is brilliant. It has a GUI for the parts of selecting and downloading the packages and then opens up a "virtual" terminal for the actual package compiling (quite like porthole).

* A creator name field for ebuilds so that we know who created what ebuilds. This helps in 2 ways, firstly it lets us see who's been doing the most work with portage and so know who to thank and it also allows us to know quickly who originally created the ebuild so that we can tell them about any problems that may exist with it. Perhaps where the notes are usually it could say "This ebuild was brought to you by ..............."? =)

* Make portage use binaries only... erm... naa forget that

Seriously, apart from those top 2 just keep doing what your doing

Anyone else have any ideas or requests?

nlindblad · Guru Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 476 Location: Lund, Sweden

What do you mean? Gentoo itself is not versioned as upgrades occur incremental, the only versioned thing is the Live-CD.

Q-collective · Advocate Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 2071

Making ebuilds is becomming almost an impossible task for newlings, so a GUI (wizard?) for creating an ebuild would be neat imho.

Q-collective · Advocate Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 2071

omp · Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2005 10:57 am Post subject:

Just like nlindblad said, Gentoo itself, unlike most other distros, does not have versions. The Live CDs are versioned because every once in a while new Live CDs are releaced with more up-to-date packages.

To get an up-to-date Gentoo system all you need to do is run this every once in a while:

nlindblad · Guru Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 476 Location: Lund, Sweden

You're welcome to write a GTK/QT/ncurses GUI to front-end portage if you like...

I see no reason to use it though, but I guess that's a matter of taste and philosophy...

omp · Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:09 am Post subject:

omp · Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:13 am Post subject:

* app-portage/portagemaster
Homepage: http://portagemaster.sourceforge.net/
Description: A java portage browser and installer

* app-portage/kentoo
Homepage: http://www.ralfhoelzer.com/kentoo.html
Description: KDE Portage frontend

* app-portage/kuroo
Homepage: http://guitoo.sourceforge.net
Description: A KDE Portage frontend

* app-portage/porthole
Homepage: http://porthole.sourceforge.net
Description: A GTK+-based frontend to Portage
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nlindblad · Guru Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 476 Location: Lund, Sweden

omp · Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:25 am Post subject:

nlindblad · Guru Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 476 Location: Lund, Sweden

micko · Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:44 am Post subject:

A suggestion for the new livecd: Ndiswrapper. Actually I'm not sure if it already is there, but if not, it should. Ok, there can't be all the windows drivers on the cd, but people could download those beforehand on a usb-disk etc...

Otherwise I think the system is perfect. =)

LucaSpiller · Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:46 am Post subject:

* Release dates in ebuilds

At the moment Portage checks for updates by checking the version numbers in the name. Having a field containing the release data would be good as it would prevent the issues with WINE that have been experienced (CVS releases thought to be newer than 0.9).
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chrisaw · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2005 Posts: 20 Location: /mnt/gentoo

Yea i'm aware of the versioning system for gentoo but as Q-collective nicely put it that wasn't really my point

Y'know, there should be another forum section for feature requests

Could be somewhere for devs to go for inspiration

Edit: Yea there are several frontends out there but it'd be nice to have a Gentoo official one. One that allows you full control over the wonderful system that is portage. Personally i love the emerge command but it'd still be nice to have a nice GUI for when i don't have time to mess around =)

Edit 2: Wow! I like that idea about ebuild dates, that'd make CVS installing a breeze =) It'd be pretty simple to implement as far as im aware too, if ebuild1 > ebuild2 then.... (yea im a basic programmer but ya get the idea

)

mark_alec · Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2005 12:51 pm Post subject:

chrisaw · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2005 Posts: 20 Location: /mnt/gentoo

See that's fair enough but it doesn't seem quite right posting feature requests in a bugs section =S Just something off putting about it. Maybe that's just me :S But it would be nice to be able to just see feature requests and not have to sift through bugs too

playfool · Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2005 2:18 pm Post subject:

Last I checked this couldn't be done, but I would love a feature to explain the use flags in each ebuild.

As I have posted earlier blindly using USE X when something X related can get enabled isn't a good idea, see cairo for explaination - thus it would be nice if there was a little text entry for each flag used in the ebuild. It's a lot of work but it helps determine what we need to compile with.. at least I hope so.

Another thing that might work out well would be use flag dependency, I've seen an issue where a package will require another package to be compiled with a certain flag to compile under certain settings - these errors arren't currently caught by portage.

third suggestion would be shipping profiles like "GNOME desktop" which would set your use flags and packages required to get a GNOME desktop running. Just running emerge gnome wouldn't work here because we are bound to get a lot of stuff installed we don't need because of the default use flags.

And finally whatever happened to the gpg check in portage, as far as I can tell we are still open to man in the middle attacks during sync

nlindblad · Guru Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 476 Location: Lund, Sweden

Sir No · Apprentice Joined: 01 May 2005 Posts: 159 Location: Poland

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

A better thread would be "Gentoo 2006.0 Feature Request IMPLEMENTORS"
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Genone · Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2005 9:51 pm Post subject:

Lets see, lots of old stuff here:
- portage GUI: use porthole (or any other from app-portage), we won't waste time with it
- ebuild release dates: no (concept doesn't work, also too much maintenance)
- ebuild writer var: use the Changelog
- per-package use flag descriptions: on the todo list
- use-deps: on the todo list
- gpg checks: signing has to be nailed down first, council is working on it
- more profiles: no clue
- ndiswrapper: no clue
- gui ebuild creator. see app-portage/abeni

playfool · Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2005 10:10 pm Post subject:

wow.. it appears I have minions doing my biddings.. cool

chrisaw · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2005 Posts: 20 Location: /mnt/gentoo

lol, i like it

Ya wont waste time with a package manager but ya willing to "waste it" on a GUI installer for an OS that upon completion has... no GUI!

lol. Sorry guys, makes no sense to me

By the way, not trying to have a digg at the coders here, gotta say... great work guys!

Shadow Skill · Veteran Joined: 04 Dec 2004 Posts: 1023

I don't see whats so bad about having an ncurses frontend be standard, I mean its not unheard of for tools that function simillarly to Portage to have them.[Sorcery] I also do not see how its a waste of time to include features that make the tools easier to use. Presenting people with a built in frontend for something like Portage is a good thing period, leaving everything up to third parties doesn't always produce very desirable results. Personally I don't like Porthole and I would love to have an ncurses frontend built in that I could use if I get tired of typing in the CLI commands to do various things to Portage. Its something that Sorcery allows and its something I really miss in Gentoo, Sorcery even has facilities for letting people choose precompiled kernels that they offer. If memory serves me you can freely elect to do the kernel build yourself from within the Sorcery interface but I am not entirely sure if this is possible as it has been quite some time since I used Sourcemage and I didn't have it installed all that long. Maybe someone else who has used Sorcemage can confirm this?
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omp · Posted: Sat Nov 26, 2005 12:28 am Post subject: