Call for Yum Frontend

[Chris Kloiber]

On Sun, 2004-05-09 at 01:55, seth vidal wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-05-08 at 12:09 -0500, Jason Knight wrote:
> > Yum is such a great package management program (very well designed 
> > except maybe for having to get all the headers) and stable, yet for some 
> > reason we expect the average home user to bust out his/her x-term and 
> > learn the in's and out's of yum CLI usage? (not to mention config file 
> > management ). Sure you might say, there is apt and synaptic, a 
> > wonderfully userfriendly combination but again: these would require the 
> > usage of yum and text line repo management to install on any stock 
> > fedora system.
> 
> Thanks for the kind words.
> 
> look on the fedora-config-list and you can see some of that discussion
> there.
> 
> I've been rewriting considerable portions of yum with this in mind.
> 
> it takes time, b/c I'm trying to keep from making a bunch of the same
> mistakes and getting rid of the 'download all the headers' requirement
> that everyone seems to hate.
> 
> -sv

Seth,

With a gui in progress (or at least being seriously considered) I had
been thinking about another project that might be useful. Perhaps a web
page where repository authors can register their repos and working
directories? A backend daemon, or yum itself could download the headers
and look for obvious incompatabilities between distributions and create
a reasonably accurate list of repos in some generic format (XML?) that a
gui could download and parse into the config de jour. If a repo stops
working for a set period of time (fairly short, 1-2 days) it's removed
and the owner can resubmit when its back online. If yum is doing the
parsing (or you reuse code from yum) of each repo, lists of available
packages could be on this site as well, so you know where to go to get
it, and what other repos will conflict with those you use. No actual
links to packages or mirroring would be needed. Just "Package foo-1.0-1
is in repository bar.com" 

Thanks for listening. 

-- 
Chris Kloiber