Overview about smart classes/functions etc.

[metzench at ccux-linux.de]

Hey,

> Right, there was similar discussion about the GTK+ version of the interface
> like in e.g. https://blueprints.launchpad.net/smart/+spec/smartgui2 etc.
But so far it has been rather light on details, except for things like
"more tabs"... If you could make a list of the concepts, it'd help a
lot.

Well, perhaps for the first step, onyl some minor changes to the existing
interface would be fine. I' m not rather sure what is possible with gtk,
as i' m more related to qt, but having some new icons and a rearrangement
of the menu itself would be a nice step. Perhaps i would see the
possibility to remove the details tab and only have the list of packages
or have them ordered vertically instead of horizontal.

> Some things that could help the interface, like e.g. group icons or package
> icons or screenshots, are missing from Smart's idea of a group or a
package.
> The PackageKit gathers such information from various external
> sources, but
> for Smart it was deemed better to only show the information in the "cache".

Thats a way i totally aggree, having such things would be nice, perhaps
for some users, but having a stable and fast package manager makes much
more points for me.

> You'll find the main app in "interactive.py", it has the "_pv" field
that holds the PackageView that is used to display the packages...
>
> Or you might be looking refreshPackages(), depends on what you mean. It
calls setPackages() on the PackageView, in order to display them.

Well, i'll have a deeper look into this.


> Right, e.g. PackageKit has a similar problem with the "smart" backend...
>
> The API and the API documentation should probably be improved for "1.4".
I made some suggestions on things that I think are missing at the
moment,
> they are available on Launchpad along with matching interface elements.
See https://code.launchpad.net/smart (and https://launchpad.net/smart)

Documentation is somehow really missing, having a real external api would
be really nice.

> And there's also some GUI stuff that could be refactored into common code.

For example?

> Well, there was no *need* for anything fancy. And KDE 4 was really buggy,
> additionally using Qt 3.3 made it work in both of the two
> environments...
> It should be better now with KDE 4.2 and Qt 4.5, so it should be possible
> to clone the "qt" interface into "qt3" and "qt4" and change the
> classes ?

Regarding performance and possibilties qt4 makes most sense now. ( This is
one thing most of our users hate when using the gtk gui, it needs too mich
performance, don' t understand why. )

I already downloaded your qt3 interface ( but it doesn' t seem to be
finished yet, throws some strange errors on some functions ). It should be
possible to port it to qt4, some main classes changed with that, but  it
would be worth a try. Perhaps i' m going to have a deeper look into this
this evening.

> But the main "stable" platforms, such as CentOS or Ubuntu LTS, uses KDE 3.
> By the way, the main reason for writing it was better support for Mac OS X.
> It didn't really work out (it looks and feels more "native", but still
ugly)
> so something else is needed to make it work "better" on Mac OS X or
Windows.

Well, but qt4 is available everywhere there too. And it' s the future, qt3
will be more and more abandoned.

> I do have some plans, but the development funding isn't really clear yet.
> The PyQt interface "works" meanwhile, if one wants to get away from GTK+.
> * http://www.algonet.se/~afb/smart/smart-1.1-qt3-mac.png (Mac OS X 10.4)
* http://www.algonet.se/~afb/smart/smart-1.2-qt3-win.png (Windows XP)

Already have it running here. :-) But some problems are still there, see
attached screenshot. Some tweaking needs to be done from my pov,
progressbars are sometimes not correct and some event refreshs need to be
added ( e.g. when downloading a package. )

Perhaps i could make some changes in it and submit them?

> If there are some major things done to the interface, I would rather see
those done consistently across all platforms than have it look
> different...
> (so that it'd end up drifting apart, like Synaptic and Kynaptic or so on)
> So maybe it would be better to do for "Smart 2.0", along with Python 3000 ?

Agree, seems to be hard to get some pacthes in smart sometimes isn' t it?
Would be some more changes be accepted....

Whats the latest version of your qt interface? Perhaps i should start with
that, not sure if the webinterface gave me what i need. Is it enough to
download interfaces/qt and the added images or are there any other changes
done for this?

Regards,
Christian Metzen
CCux Linux Lead Development