[Nix-dev] Nix GUI

[Anders F Björklund]

Tony White wrote:

>> 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.
[...]
> Not quite sure what this is :
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/packagekit/tree/lib/packagekit-qt
> QT = C++.

That would be one of those components, later used by KPackageKit...
For gnome-packagekit the gtk components are not as stand-alone yet.

> 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.

Well, I would suggest urpmi (for the perl) and portage/ports
(due to being similarly source-based), but it doesn't matter.


The first part would just be to wrap some calls to nix-env -q,
and implement the GetPackages/GetDetails/Resolve/SearchNames...

That seems easy, but a tad slow: `nix-env -qa --description '*'`
and `nix-env -q --xml --meta $pkg` with some perl xml parsing.

Next is GetDepends/GetRequires which I'm not sure how you do,
and InstallPackages/RemovePackages which are straightforward.

GetRepoList and RefreshCache should be easy with nix-channel,
like `nix-channel --list` and `nix-channel --update` or so.


List is at: http://www.packagekit.org/gtk-doc/Transaction.html,
some features like GetUpdateDetail/WhatProvides require features.

--anders