On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, David Farning wrote: > I got yum working as a back end to redhat-config-packages yesterday--see > screen shot below. Pretty. I would suggest that you remain open to making "something completely different" in the fullness of time. For example, a tree view might be more useful than a flat view. Also, right now yum uses several DIFFERENT commands to present information on a given package -- info, list, provides -- and hides package dependencies and conflicts from a user until they are ready to actually install. This is fine in a command line environment, but a GUI could present a unified view of much of this, and in fact could even present a lot of it at the same time. Just as an example, if you display had separate windows for "info", "provides", a tree view of dependencies with all the UNinstalled depenencies expanded, then a mouse "hover" over or click on a package name could "instantly" display the package info in these windows. A good graphical view of dependencies would actually extend yum's capabilities in a meaningful way, in my opinion, especially if one could click on unexpanded tree nodes and observe the longer range consequences of rearranging packages to accomodate them and visibly see dependency loops and the like. I'd also recommend keeping some sort of "review actions" window before actually installing or removing anything -- encapsulating yum's interactive reluctance to do anything without letting a user tell it twice. This is especially important on a GUI where you might click twenty items for installation, some of which have scrolled far off the final screen and may have been incorrectly selected. It would also be useful to encapsulate e.g. the selection of repositories from the yum public repo list and other stuff, but I'm sure you've got all that planned. Very cool, though. Should definitely improve the utility of yum to "users" who aren't also unix admin geeks with a high command line comfort level. rgb > Three considerations that would help me and others who would like to use > yum. I'm interested in this as well. Now that I've bought a python book and learned rudimentary python overnight, the next step is going to be figuring out what its internal ABI is. From my experiment writing a yum wrapper in perl, invoking yum (or, in all probability, its calls) repeatedly to generate its printed output is highly inefficient and requires parsing and repacking of the output which is generally a PITA. rgb Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb@xxxxxxxxxxxx
