[opensuse-project] Re: [yast-devel] Package Search and Simple Install status report

Thanks for keeping us all in the loop; some really nice things going on there.

On 4/25/07, Benji Weber b.weber@warwick.ac.uk wrote:

• I've been working on improving the performance of the trawler, I can

now from a clean database locate, download, parse, index the metadata for the main official/community & build service repositories in under half an hour on my desktop. (That's ~900 repositories, ~110,000 packages including summaries/descriptions, ~16,000,000 files), incremental updates where only some repositories have changed are much faster.

This is really awesome news; so people now will be able to get really up-to-date package results/information even on Factory, I take it?

• Integration with the simple software installation (explained below)

that I've been proposing, with "Install now" links on

    http://benjiweber.co.uk:8080/webpin/index-test.jsp

= Simple Software Installation =

The vast majority of the questions we face when there are not serious things wrong with the distribution are related to issues such as installation of third party software, multimedia codecs etc. Explaining to new users the concept of package repositories, how to add these, and subsequently install software is not trivial. Furthermore, users should not be forced to grasp these concepts in order to easily install software, in my opinion.

To solve this we could have a simple file handler that can handle links in web pages or files on distributable media which automates the process of adding repositories and installing software.

• I've set up a wiki page outlining the concept at

http://en.opensuse.org/MetaPackage-design

• I've created a functional prototype yast module, Pascal has kindly

made a package which you can try at:

    http://bw.uwcs.co.uk/mp/yast2-mpp-0.0-0.suse102.noarch.rpm

    After installing this you can try out some demo uses at

            http://bw.uwcs.co.uk/test.html
            The "install now" links on http://benjiweber.co.uk:8080/webpin/index-test.jsp

            Currently the above will only work with konqueror, unless you create

the associations manually for firefox/opera in the same way as they are configured in konqueror (this is possible, but difficult to package without having the configuration in the upstream distribution package)

This is exciting stuff as well, _particularly_ with the design of the OBS (hundreds of repositories); I really really hope we can get this kind of stuff in for 10.3 by default, so users don't have to worry about adding a repository and then adding the package.

            Martin Schandler is creating a demo page to show how this could be

used to simplify codec installation, for now hopefully you can use your imagination.

So it'll be even easier for users to get the fuller OS experience quickly :)

= Future =

    - Search service joint hosting Novell/Community, adrianS is looking into this.
    - Migration of the frontend to the search to opensuse-community.org
    - Fix ycp/perl to a releasable state. (someone who knows what they're doing)
    - Improve the "Install now" functionality of the search service, by

calculating the repositories each package depends on (it isn't always just the one the package is located in). I am currently investigating either a simple method looking at the repository dependencies in the build service and manual setup for repositories outside the build service, and a far more complicated method using the rpm requires & depends.

So are there going to be any reasonable methods for detecting duplicate repositories?

    - Integration with new build service features such as statistics,

using the search service statistics to improve results. - Using search service to enrich client side software.

What kind of things can we hope for? Are these likely to be integrated into 10.3? With all the zypp work around I guess there won't really be any editing to the software frontends?

Kind thoughts,