Progress Report 5

[Justin Edward Muniz]

This progress report covers the work to create better GUI package management, for the week beginning the 16th of July, and ending the 22nd.

The work period marked the beginning of a change from development being concentrated on bug-removal and the back end, to a focus on new features for the GUI front ends. Since I am familiar with Qt, I spent some time reviewing it's documentation; catching up on areas I felt rusty with, and expanding my knowledge a bit further by exploring the networking capabilities. 

I also discovered a lot about GTK+, which I was not as knowledgable about. Before this project, I had never actually created a GTK+ widget, so things felt pretty new. I improved my development environment by installing Qt Creator and glade. The GUI design tools both are intuitive to me, though I had already logged many hours using Creator. Though vim is great for coding, Creator has a few really cool features that enhance my Qt development productivity.

I continued to brainstorm for GUI functionality, adding notes to the TODO file. While examining the front ends for areas to improve, I noted all of the bugs that I came across. It seems that I discovered all of the obvious bugs in the front ends. I fixed some of the bugs with ease, and with one set of error messages, a temporary quick fix. Most but not all of the bugs that I fixed had to do with the ports. At the beginning of this project, the front end ports had numerous bugs that prevented them from even being installed. I sorted out all of the issues and the front ends were completely installable at this point.

I also worked on the PackageKit port itself, resolving issues with installation. There was a configuration argument being passed that was no longer valid, which I removed. I modified the configuration option to help the user choose their back end. I also modified the documentation to be included by default, and moved some docbook dependencies to only be included if the documentation was selected. I also narrowed in on some ports back end bugs that have prevented it from working at all. As I moved through testing the features I checked them off a list. Some of the bugs were easy to resolve, but some bugs still remain. It was necessary to perform enhancements to the PackageKit port in the first place, because I had to add moc file regeneration to the PackageKit-qt4 installation process in order to fix the broken port.

I brainstormed more forms of assistance the pk-setter script could provide, such as backing up and restoring configuration files, and setting up the default pkgng repository information. I also came up with a better overall design for the project Wiki page.

Thanks for reading,
Justin Muniz