[gentoo-soc] [GSoC] User Generated Content and major rewrite of packages.gentoo.org

[gentoo-soc] [GSoC] User Generated Content and major rewrite of packages.gentoo.org

[Fabio Erculiani]

Hi there,
I'm sure many of you know me already, so let's go straight to the point.
This year I decided to participate to the GSoC as student working
towards something I am really missing in Gentoo land. A complete,
modern online "packages" browser, with "User Generated Content"
features.

You can read my full proposal at:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/lxnay/1

Short description:
Facebook, Twitter and others are just a simple demonstration about how
people can share informations eachothers getting a mutual benefit. The
same concept should be applied to http://packages.gentoo.org, letting
people add metadata to packages (comments, images, votes, example
files, etc).

Cheers,
-- 
Fabio Erculiani
http://lxnay.com

Re: [gentoo-soc] [GSoC] User Generated Content and major rewrite of packages.gentoo.org

[Robin H. Johnson]

On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 06:45:25PM +0000, Fabio Erculiani wrote:
> Hi there,
> I'm sure many of you know me already, so let's go straight to the point.
> This year I decided to participate to the GSoC as student working
> towards something I am really missing in Gentoo land. A complete,
> modern online "packages" browser, with "User Generated Content"
> features.
> 
> You can read my full proposal at:
> http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/lxnay/1
> 
> Short description:
> Facebook, Twitter and others are just a simple demonstration about how
> people can share informations eachothers getting a mutual benefit. The
> same concept should be applied to http://packages.gentoo.org, letting
> people add metadata to packages (comments, images, votes, example
> files, etc).
The social network and added data integration is a lot smaller portion
of work than rewriting packages.g.o.

There is one large bit of work that is needed in terms of any
packages.g.o rewrite, that has become evident from all prior attempts:
At every ingest pass, you MUST build a complete new list of (CPV,
profile, keyword) => (availability state), and diff that entire list
against the list from the previous pass.
This is needed to pick up ebuilds that have been added/removed to
package.mask (potentially in some subset of profiles). You cannot detect
this based on changes to the ebuild, since the changes are outside of
that.

This is the major flaw in the existing packages.g.o site, detecting an
item being removed from a package.mask file is very difficult.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux: Developer, Trustee & Infrastructure Lead
E-Mail     : robbat2@gentoo.org
GnuPG FP   : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED  F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85