Mailinglist Archive: yast-devel (85 mails)

[Lukas Ocilka <lukas.ocilka@xxxxxxx>]

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/OneClickInstallStandard.pm
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@xxxxxxxxxxxx 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)
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