Application for GSoC Project - Package WebUI

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Wed, 2008-03-26 at 21:36 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> Pavel Khardikov wrote:
> > Thorsten Leemhuis writes:
> > 
> >> On 24.03.2008 17:46, Pavel Khardikov wrote:
> >>  
> >>> Thorsten Leemhuis writes:
> >>>    
> >>>> On 23.03.2008 23:14, Alex Lancaster wrote:
> >>>>      
> >>>>>>>>>> "pk" == pavel khardikov  writes:
> >>>>>>>>>>                                 
> >>>>> [...]
> >>>>> pk> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SummerCoding/2008/Ideas
> >>>>> It seems that the WebUI overlaps considerably with the "MyFedora" idea
> >>>>> which has already been started:
> >>>>>         
> >>>> Yeah, MyFedora was still young (or even not born yet) when I added the
> >>>> idea to the wiki. I don't know much about MyFedora, but afaics it could
> >>>> need help as well and might be a good GSoC project.
> >>>>       
> >>> Thanks for your reply.
> >>> It is a great pity :(
> >>>
> >>> If I understood there is no reason to start doing Package WebUI from 
> >>> the very begining because
> >>> MyFedora project is aimed at solving the same problems.
> >>>     
> >>
> >> I'm can not properly answer this question. J5 (the MyFedora develop)
> >> likely can do that better.
> >>
> >> >From what I can see on
> >> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MyFedora
> >> it seems to me that developers are the main target audience of MyFedora.
> >> Only the second screenshot indicates that MyFedora might provide
> >> something like packages.debian.org (which also provides a good service
> >> for users)
> >>
> >>  
> >>> In what way the idea of Package WebUI can be relate to GSoC?
> >>>
> >>> As far as I can see the idea of WebInstall is similar?
> >>> Is WebInstall project still relevant to GSoC or MyFedora will cope 
> >>> with its functions?
> >>>     
> >>
> >> I'd suggest you contact J5, the developer of MyFedora. Maybe he can help
> >> to answer the question if a separate WebUI makes sense (which I doubt).
> >>
> >> Cu
> >> knurd
> >>
> >>   
> > Ok.
> > 
> > Thanks for your reply.
> > 
> Sorry I didn't this thread earlier,  Pavel, how interested in this are 
> you?  How self-motivated?  I could see doing something like this as a 
> GSoC project but hadn't really thought about it before.  We should have 
> a talk between you, J5 (John Palmieri -- myfedora), skvidal (Seth Vidal 
> -- repoview/yum metadata), and I (abadger1999 -- pkgdb) about what would 
> be a useful and good chunk of code for a GSoC project.
> 
> I can be found on IRC as abadger1999, in irc.freenode.net #fedora-admin, 
> #fedora-devel.  Like I said, I haven't thought about doing this until 
> now so we'd need to get busy on this if you're interested.
> 
> -Toshio

So, MyFedora, while being developer targeted is taking a user designed
approach.  What this means is that instead of displaying all the
information in the world about a subject (say packages) it displays the
most common actions and information a developer would need in their day
to day work.  For instance, I am working on the build page and what it
shows is what builds were done for a package, if there is an error it
will display a link for the log that is most likely to have the error in
it.  If there are downloads available it will show only the package and
sub packages, excluding debuginfo and devel for the arch the user is
running on.  There is a more link to see all of the downloads so I do
add some drill down facilities but it is not a priority.  The part I am
working on now is if the package is in testing or candidate repos and
you have the rights to request a push it will have an action to push to
a release via bodhi.  And that is just the builds page.  In every case I
pull from our existing tools via json or xmlrpc instead of recreating
databases.

Now that I have outlined the development mentality for MyFedora I have a
couple of ideas where this GSoC Project should fit in.  

First, there are two elements we want to consider, a package database
and an application database.  Users care about applications (a
collection of packages which make up a program which is usually launched
from a menu), developers care about package (a collection of
interrelated files and rules for putting them on a disk as well as
specifying dependencies).  One tool could most likely have a UI and DB
to fit both with minor tweaks.

If you want to just make a data mining tool it will most likely be
better off as a separate TurboGears project in which MyFedora could
access its data based off of specific packages.

If you wanted it to be part of MyFedora you will have to think in terms
of the users, what do they want to see, how do they want to see it, what
actions would they need and how does it integrate with other Fedora
tools.

Personally if it was part of MyFedora I would want it to be much more
than just a view into a package.  I would want people to be able to
write comments, have annotations for the next build, be able to trace
unneeded dependencies, be able to see and download patches to send to
upstream, and it should be able to do this without looking like the barf
of information the Debian package db is (however useful that barf of
information is ;)  In other words it should be a tool towards making
fedora packages and the upstream sources they pulled from better.

If you are up for that challenge (and I am not saying you have to get it
all done but move in that direction) then it will be a perfect fit for
MyFedora.  I would be happy to mentor.

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>