Application for GSoC Project - Package WebUI

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Sat, 2008-03-29 at 19:10 +0800, Izhar Firdaus wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 6:33 PM, Pavel Khardikov <sonic at inetwork.ru> wrote:
> >  Hello, Izhar!
> >
> >  Excuse me for not writting in this list for long time.
> >
> >  I still have a great interest in Fedora and GSoC projects in particular.
> >
> >  At one of my first letters Thorsten Leemhuis replied:
> >
> >  "No idea - as I said, I just added the idea to the wiki. I have no ideas
> >  nor skills how to actually realize the WebUI, thus I don't think I can
> >  mentor this idea further and * * I don't have the time or interest for it.
> >  Sorry. "
> >
> >  and
> >
> >
> >  "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). "
> >
> >  As I understood there is no sence to create another project that
> >  performs the same tasks and functions as MyFedora.
> 
> Same goes for me, but looking Mockups, It looks a lot like PackageDB,
> but with an improved UI .. so, in my mind, rather than making MyFedora
> take PackageDB's ( http://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb |
> https://fedorahosted.org/packagedb/ ) work, why dont extend PackageDB?
> .. PackageDB code is already out there .. revamp the UI, add more
> features .. I used the name "PackageWebUI" was because thats the title
> in the Fedora GSOC Idea page .. but I would prefer an approach of
> improving pkgdb rather than writing a new one..
> 
> my.fedoraproject.org / MyFedora - the name sounds more like a Fedora
> AIO to me, and thats also what i understand from
> 
> "my.fedoraproject.org is a project to integrate all of the Fedora
> infrastructure in one place. The goal is to create a modular web page
> in which each module would pull views from the various Fedora
> resources and display them to the user.",
> 
> and one of those modules, could be an integration to
> PkgDB/PackageWebUI .. Unix philosophy: "Write programs that do one
> thing and do it well." .. PkgDB focuses on packages, MyFedora focuses
> on integrating the rest of Fedora infrastructure. Of course, provide a
> way for all of them to communicate with each other
> (JSON,XMLRPC,whatever).
> 
> Or do J5 have different view about this?, both idea ( improve MyFedora
> / improve PackageDB ) sounds okay to me, just that I feel that if
> MyFedora implements those features, PackageDB and the effort made for
> it previously would be rendered of no-use (or perhaps thats what one
> of MyFedora's goal - to obsolete packagedb ) ..

There is a balance here.  For everything I have to pull from there is a
cost in terms of calls I have to make to different backends per page
along with the extra work to recreate the GUI for each module.  The
different backends are taking a tools centric approach to manipulating
data where as My Fedora takes a more data centric approach (here is the
data how would I like to manipulate and display).  I agree the data side
of it should be part of PackageDB but unless someone really wants to
work on a separate PackageDB UI I would just have that be a simple dump
of the database in a slightly nicer form.

In any case my thoughts on the subject are logged somewhere else in the
thread where I talk about Apps vs. Packages and how a separate app would
look different from a My Fedora app.  Read there.

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