Overview about smart classes/functions etc.

[Keith Roberts]

On Sat, 6 Jun 2009, metzench at ccux-linux.de wrote:
> To: Anders F Björklund <afb at algonet.se>
> From: metzench at ccux-linux.de
> Subject: Re: Overview about smart classes/functions etc.
> 
> Hi Anders,
>
> thanks for your answer.
>
>> There isn't much developer documentation, there's some 
>> user docs and that's about it - unless reading the .py 
>> source code counts... But if you have questions about it, 
>> then do put them to the list. Now, when you say "our 
>> own", does that mean with a diffent layout ?
>
> Different layout, yes this is one thought about that. Don' 
> t misunderstand this, i really like smart and we are now 
> using it nearly since its beginning. But the gtk gui ( and 
> so is the qt 3 gui you wrote ) is a little bit outdated 
> about gui concepts. Most users want something more fresh 
> and perhaps some more of smarts functions when querying 
> packages.

My sentiments to.

I would like to see a search facility inside the Content 
tab of the lower window pane.

This would allow one to see if a particular file exists 
in an installed package, and to find out it's installation 
path on the system.

Some packages have LOTS of files installed and searching 
manually can be quite a chore.

Regarding a Python GUI IDE for developing Smart PM - 
Eclipse provides a Python IDE plugin.

Not tested it out yet - I'm on Fedora 10, and ran out of 
disk space when trying to install Fedora 10's default 
Eclipse package and the Python plugin.

Kind Regards,

Keith Roberts

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> Well biggest question for the beginning... Which function calls the main
> package list that displays in the center of the smart screen? I played
> arounf with packageview.py but somehow this whole stuff is really
> undocumented and somehow not really logically, especially for me perhaps.
>
>> The way the current graphic interface works is that there is a common
>> code, that calls upon a specific "interface" implementation to show it.
>>  From your description it sounds like you are writing an external app,
>> but Smart doesn't really have an external API - at least not explicitly.
>
> Well, thats right, an external app was the thought, having it integrated
> into smarts layout would be fine too, but as far as i see right now it' s
> really hard to somehow track this all down because  of this specific
> interface implementation thats not really documented in any way. Make it
> hard for some external development doesn' t it?
>
>
>> The qt(3) interface should be more or less done, but the overall idea
>> about it is that it should be as similar as possible to the gtk one...
>
> Well understand that, but why not using qt4? As it amkes things really
> more lets say fancy for users. And perhaps integrate some more of smarts
> basic functions?
>
>> There's also a totally different Qt4 interface to Smart in KPackage,
>> which presents its own interface and then makes calls over to smart.
>
> *brr* ever used that? Right now i'm really thinking about going the
> wrapper way for a somehow new fashioneed gui, need to investigate this
> some more tomorrow.
>
> Regards,
> Christian Metzen
> CCux Linux Lead Development
>
>