[gentoo-dev] Unified tool for Gentoo specific tasks?

[gentoo-dev] Unified tool for Gentoo specific tasks?

[Michael Kohl]

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Hi!

One of the things which disturbs me about Gentoo Linux (admittedly only
slightly, but still) is the "clutter" of seperate tools I have
installed which are Gentoo specific: mirrorselect, ufed, gentoolkit
(although I only have it because of etcat), some things from the forums
like (ebb - http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=275364#275364
and femerge - http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=45827), epm
(which I haven't installed, but still). Sure this is not really a big
problem, but various posts in forums and mailing lists lead me to the
conclusion that quite a few users are not aware of one or the other of
this useful little helpers.

Hence an idea came to my mind, which I'd like to discuss on this list
for a while before going through the hassle of writing a full-featured
GLEP:

Daniel Robbins never made a secret of Gentoo (or at least the Portage
system) being inspired by BSD. One of the things I really like about
FreeBSD is /stand/sysinstall, where you can configure many aspects of
your system quite comfortable via a curses based interface. This lead me
to the conclusion that something similar would be nice for Gentoo Linux.

As I already hear you scream, here's what I _don't_ want to propose: no,
I'm not arguing in favor of a tool which configures every aspect of your
system. linuxconf, Webmin and the likes do this job fair enough,
reduplicating their efforts would be something I'd rather not want to
see. Also I have the feeling that most Gentoo Linux users are familiar
and comfortable with editing config files by hand.

What I was thinking about is a unified, curses-based frontend for the
various aforementioned tools. And creative like I feel today I already
came up with a code name for this proposal, "Emergency". ;-)

So, what do I "Emergency" want to be:
1. a unified frontend for _Gentoo specific_ configurations
(mirrorselect, ufed, etc.)
2. I'm voting for a curses based frontend so this tool can be used on
machines without XFree, via ssh etc. but think the tool should be
modular enough for different interfaces (e.g. gtk, qt, browser based).
The kernel config comes to mind as an example (compare make menuconfig
to make xconfig and make gconfig (gtk, development sources)), as well as
mldonkey.
3. people not interested in "Emergency" shouldn't have to use it! Maybe
a useflag can do the trick and install tools like ufed and mirrorselect
either as standalone applications or as plugins for "Emergency".
4. In regard to 2. and 3. the whole application should be designed as
modular as possible, and allow for plugins to be written in as
many languages as possible (shell scripts, Perl, Python and Ruby come to
my mind, but I'm sure there are also some people who'd love to see C or
more exotic languages thrown in the mix). So maybe "Emergency" wouldn't
really be an application on it's on, but a framework which allows the
authors of the various config tools to integrate them nicely.
5. Perl being famous for being a good "glue language" would be my
preference for the framework, but I'm not biased towards any language in
particular and open for argument on the pros/cons of alternatives.

Tools I'd love to see included: mirrorselect, ufed, epm, an ebuild
browser (as full featured as possible, making use of all the nice stuff
available in etcat), gcc-config, java-config, genkernel (also I haven't
looked at it yet, maybe it's not really a candidate for being included
in this kind of tool), a new tool for managing all the"portage options"
in/etc/make.conf(like portdir overlay, rsync retries, logging,
fetchcommand, offering the comments from make.conf as ufed does with
use.desc etc.). I'm pretty sure if we all think for a while we can come
up with quite a few more modules... 

Please note that I didn't really do much of coding during the last few
years (except for web related stuff - php, mysql etc.), but just played
around with various languages (namely Perl, Ruby and nowadays Python)
for fun. _BUT_ if there's interest in a tool like this, I would love
to put a considerable amount of time into this project, helping out
wherever I can, be it coding, improving the concept, planning or
coordinating of the development...

Sorry for this rather long message, I just wanted to make the idea as
clear as possible.

Curious about what all of you think about this,
Michael

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Unified tool for Gentoo specific tasks?

[Michael Kohl]

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Sorry for replying to myself, but something else came to my mind:

An interface for gentoo-stable could be integrated as "Emergency"
plugin, listing all ~ARCH masked packages currently installed and giving
the user the ability to report them to the site. A more convenient way
of providing this information would lead to a more useful gentoo-stable
site in my opinion, because I guess that more people would submit their
information.

Michael

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Unified tool for Gentoo specific tasks?

[Michael Kohl]

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Last reply to myself before anyone else answers, promised! ;-)

When I said "curses based" interface I maybe didn't make myself
perfectly clear. After a look at the ufed source (which I should have
had before the original post), I found out that it uses dialog as do ebb
and femerge which I mentioned.

I don't prefer either the use of ncurses or dialog, I just wanted to
give an impression of the kind of interface I imagined for this tool.

Michael

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Unified tool for Gentoo specific tasks?

[Sven Blumenstein]

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On Tue, 10 Jun 2003 16:45:19 +0800
Michael Kohl <citizen428@cargal.org> wrote:

> Hi!

Hello!

> 
> One of the things which disturbs me about Gentoo Linux (admittedly
> only slightly, but still) is the "clutter" of seperate tools I have
> installed which are Gentoo specific: mirrorselect, ufed, gentoolkit
> (although I only have it because of etcat), some things from the
> forums like (ebb -
> http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=275364#275364
> and femerge - http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=45827), epm
> (which I haven't installed, but still). Sure this is notss really a
> big problem, but various posts in forums and mailing lists lead me to
> the conclusion that quite a few users are not aware of one or the
> other of this useful little helpers.

I agree with that. I did read about ufed and mirrorselect here on the
mailing list first. It should at least get mentioned in the install docs
and maybe also included on the LiveCD as it would have much use on
installation.

> 
> What I was thinking about is a unified, curses-based frontend for the
> various aforementioned tools. And creative like I feel today I already
> came up with a code name for this proposal, "Emergency". ;-)
> 

Heh, I like that name ;)

And the idea behind it sounds good aswell. But instead of adding another
new package, I would add the above mentioned tools to
app-admin/gentoolkit together with the frontend. That way you could use
every programm standalone or use it from the "Emergency" menu.

As for the programming part, in my opinion shell scripts with use of
"dialog" for the GUI are a good option.

regards,
Sven

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Unified tool for Gentoo specific tasks?

[Michael Kohl]

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On Tue, 10 Jun 2003 16:42:36 +0200
Sven Blumenstein <me@0x1337.net> wrote:

> I agree with that. I did read about ufed and mirrorselect here on the
> mailing list first. It should at least get mentioned in the install
> docs and maybe also included on the LiveCD as it would have much use
> on installation.

Don't know about the LiveCD's, haven't tried one for quite a while. But
people not knowing about one or the other tool I encounter quite often.

> >And creative like I feel today I
> > already came up with a code name for this proposal, "Emergency". ;-)
> > 
> 
> Heh, I like that name ;)

Thanks.

> And the idea behind it sounds good aswell. But instead of adding
> another new package, I would add the above mentioned tools to
> app-admin/gentoolkit together with the frontend. That way you could
> use every programm standalone or use it from the "Emergency" menu.

Hm, that doesn't sound bad either. But sometimes I have the feeling that
gentoolkit is a collection of tools which don't have a place yet (like
etc-update moving to portage, epm becoming it's own package), but I
might as well be wrong on that.

> As for the programming part, in my opinion shell scripts with use of
> "dialog" for the GUI are a good option.

Afer looking at ufed's code I realised that it also uses dialog. But
it's written in Perl. And actually I think that giving the possibility
to write a plug-in for "Emergency" in a variety of languages makes it
more attractive. But still, nothing against the use of dialog (or
Xdialog[1] for a GTK version of "Emergency").

Michael

[1] http://www.chez.com/godefroy/


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Unified tool for Gentoo specific tasks?

[Robin H.Johnson]

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On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 11:03:14PM +0800, Michael Kohl wrote:
> > As for the programming part, in my opinion shell scripts with use of
> > "dialog" for the GUI are a good option.
> Afer looking at ufed's code I realised that it also uses dialog. But
> it's written in Perl. And actually I think that giving the possibility
> to write a plug-in for "Emergency" in a variety of languages makes it
> more attractive. But still, nothing against the use of dialog (or
> Xdialog[1] for a GTK version of "Emergency").
In doing the cleanup work on ufed to get rid of the much reported bugs,
myself and another developer found just how limiting dialog is.

It would be wonderful if it easily supported multi-modal inputs and
other non-binary options, but they are literally a nightmare.

If you say it can be done, look at the kernel, I suggest you go and look
at the copy of dialog that ships with the kernel. It is a really nasty
bit of hacked up code, completely non-extendable.

For the future UFED, we full-well realized that it would be best as a
core library that has no UI functionality of it's own, and then each UI
is written to just use the library. The (n)curses library that a new
text mode UI would have needs to have a LOT more features than dialog to
be seriously useful. Something like Turbo Vision (the interface style of
the original Borland/Turbo Pascal/C, but in Perl or Python would go a
long way towards what we would like. Turbo Vision was wonderfully
extensible for what it was.

-- 
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