Benji Weber wrote:

Greetings all,

I unfortunately don't think it is going to be possible to get the metapackage handler / single click install feature ready for 10.3. The current situation is:

- There is a version in factory with major bugs and incomplete functionality.

- There is a version I'm working on using the new specification [http://en.opensuse.org/Standards/One_Click_Install] which I am unlikely to have time to complete within the next 2 weeks, as I am still working full time and moving house. As I understand it, alpha 6 (final alpha) freeze is this Friday.

This is entirely my fault as I drastically underestimated the amount of time I would require to complete the implementation of the handler for the finalised specification of the metapackages, and consequently wasted too much time working on a ycp -> codedom project. I have hit a number of problems that have delayed me considerably, particularly as with mvidner away there is no YCP guru on IRC.

Hi, Frankly, I don't think you've failed here, terms are always to be postponed :) Some features can even get an exception-privilege to be delivered after a freeze deadline but you'll need to talk to AJ (in Cc:). With 'IRC' you, of course, mean irc.freenode.net, don't you? You can always ask here on yast-devel or ask someone to join the #yast channel on freenode.

Causing me particular delays at present are:

- Buggy/undefined behaviour of yast2-pkg-bindings, particularly deleting packages and some of the resolvable functions seem to not be working properly at all, but debugging these is slow. I will post testcases when I have them.

- YCP's lack of object orientation means even the simplest additional feature in the XML tends to lead to a ballooning of fragile logic within the handling code. Even with the YCPXML helper to hide the lists of maps of lists mess it is taking me far too long just to write code that works at all, let alone robust or testable.

This will have its own announcement but check this out: http://svn.opensuse.org/svn/yast/trunk/packager/src/modules/OneClickInstallS... It's a simple Perl/YaST module that parses <repositories> in your One Click Install - Standard and returns them as list of maps (repositories). I plan to use that format for "Additional External Repositories" in installation and on a running system. So,... you don't need to write everything in YCP, Perl suits better for some tasks and parsing a data structure is definitely easier in Perl.

There is also a considerable amount of work to do even if development were complete, for example chasing getting mimetype associations into each browser package.

You might ask for help on opensuse-packaging@opensuse.org mailing-list.

Given the problems I am encountering and given our timescales I think the only option now may be to delay inclusion of this to post-10.3 and re-think the design. Probably implement the XML handling and communication with package manager in some other language/platform and possibly use YCP/YaST just for the GUI. We can also watch what ubuntu are doing with their similar project [http://www.cypherbios.org/blog/?p=41&language=en] and see if we can learn any lessons.

It can be developed as a FACTORY package, there are no deadlines :) Bye Lukas -- Lukas Ocilka, YaST Developer (xn--luk-gla45d) ----------------------------------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX, s. r. o., Lihovarska 1060/12, Praha 9, Czech Republic