[Nix-dev] Nix GUI

[Tony White]

On 12 April 2010 17:45, Anders F Björklund <afb at algonet.se> wrote:
> Tony White wrote:
>
>> Yeah the gnome ui is written in gtk and the kde ui is written in qt4,
>> I don't quite see how that makes them exactly desktop specific other
>> than using a few bindings from either desktop, which could be stripped
>> out and replaced if need be. Both are open source projects and are
>> easily installed whatever the desktop.
>
> Well gnome-packagekit has GNOME dependencies and KPackageKit has
> KDE4 dependencies, beyond just GTK+ and Qt4. This is by design...
> Some of the UI components are reusable outside those applications.
> PackageKit itself uses GObject (and DBUS), plus PolicyKit/DeviceKit.
>
>> packagekit is mostly for users that don't want to go anywhere near the
>> command line. [...]
>
> But PackageKit itself is usable for those users, for instance some
> applications use it to install font support or drivers and so on.
> You are probably right about the audience, some typical use cases
> and users are listed on http://www.packagekit.org/pk-profiles.html
>
>> One thing I'm a little unsure of is that I think that some hooks would
>> maybe need to be needed somewhere (Maybe to nix itself) To tell
>> packagekit something has happened, started, finished, etc?
>
> Not really, PackageKit will spawn a new backend when it needs some
> information and then shut down after an idle timeout (= 5 seconds!)
> This *could* mean that Nix would need an interim cache database,
> for caching Nixpkgs information between those PackageKit calls...
>
>> I agree that C++ is a good idea but just a proof of concept using perl
>> or something might be a good starting point.
>
> Main reason for Perl would be that Nix is (partly) written in it,
> otherwise PackageKit has better support for making Python backends.
> Here's one example of such a backend written in Perl (for URPMI):
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/packagekit/tree/backends/urpmi/helpers/urpmi-dispatched-backend.pl
>
> --anders
>
>

Hi Anders,
Looks like you've been sniffing around their tree. :)
I think the apt implementation is the one to look at. Both python and
C++ back ends. It's also the most feature complete on the matrix.
Not quite sure what this is :
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/packagekit/tree/lib/packagekit-qt
QT = C++.

Thanks,
Tony