[Mageia-dev] The shiny new Control Center

Sun Sep 30 13:07:15 CEST 2012

On 30/09/12 17:03, nicolas.lecureuil at free.fr wrote:
+>> Hi everyone,
+>>
+>> I have been doing a little work on the proposed control center - mcc2
+>>
+>> https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Feature:UiAbstraction4mcc
+>>
+>> and would like to put a couple of questions forward to find some direction.
+> i don't see the point of this rewrite. This have not been discussed a lot but i think that
+> this is a lack of time. For me the prior thing to do would be to write a interactive::qt for mcc using perl-qt4 or perl-kde4
+
+Okay, so I see the argument of prioritizing and putting your resources 
+towards the highest valued projects, however, the fact is that if I was 
+not putting time into this, I would be putting time into my academic 
+projects, not another Mageia project.
+
+Also, if it was not a Mageia Control Center, I would be writing the 
+Debian Control Center or the Fedora Control Center or the generic 
+control center that any distro can use if they find it useful, but I 
+would be most happy with Mageia, because the distro and the community rock.
+Angelo and Matteo have put time into packaging (and now bug fixing) 
+libyui, but that is something that should be looked at regardless. 
+libyui is already in the other major distros, and is useful for writing 
+other programs.
+
+So the reality is, there is no waste of resources.
+
+> I think  that if you want to write it in an other language this is more because you have not saw  that all our code is linked
+> so you will double the code base,  the code to maintain, the possible bugs, etc etc.
+
+If it was my language of choice I would be writing it in C++. It was 
+100% due to discussions on the list and in IRC that led to writing it in 
+Perl. As noted, I have previously never written any Perl, and so it 
+would not have been my first or even second choice, I did it purely 
+because of the feedback I received from the Mageia community.
+
+When talking about other languages, I am not referring to the main 
+program, but only optional (not core) modules.
+
+>> 1/ What should we call it ??
+>>
+>>           I have been using mcc2 as a working name, however I'm not
+>> convinced this is the right approach. I will soon be uploading the code
+>> (been using my own svn repo up till now), and it would be good to start
+>> with the name it will stick with. Should the name relate to Mageia?, or
+>> should it be more generic?
+>>
+> you will upload it where ? you can use a github repo i think to make it public.
+
+Currently I am using a university server with svn and Redmine, and I am 
+completely happy with it. I was going to move it to the mageia repo so 
+that people could see the program as it progresses, and perhaps even 
+contribute if they feel motivated to do so. If anyone is interested they 
+can let me know and I'll create them an account, Angelo and Matteo 
+already have full access.
+
+>> 2/ What languages should be available for writing modules? (Perl, C++,
+>> python and Ruby are possibilities)
+>>
+>>           So far mcc2 has been written in Perl (even though I had never
+>> written a line of Perl prior to starting this) so as to make porting
+>> existing modules a matter of just replacing the Ui calls, but I do like
+>> the idea of allowing the modules to be written in more than 1 language
+>> to encourage more contributors who may be turned off by having to learn
+>> another language.
+>> Sticking with Perl will make mcc2 core easier, so I may do that
+>> initially regardless. What do you all think?? Is sticking with 1
+>> language preferred even if it means less contributors, or is the goal to
+>> attract as many module developers as possible?
+> yes but our libraries are in perl too don't forget this ( libDrakX ). In general i am not a big fan of
+> mixing languages.
+
+Okay, so +1 for Perl only.
+>> 3/ What should the license be?
+>>           I would be happy to make it GPL V3, but is there any argument
+>> for something different ?
+> As mcc is in gplv2+ i think you have to stick with this licence ( not 100% sure )
+
+Well, the core is a full rewrite, so potentially it could be licensed 
+any way I choose. The modules however are planned to reuse code to save 
+time and so they would have to respect the existing licenses.
+
+When asking about licensing, I am referring to the core, not modules.
+
+>> Just to give you an idea of where my code is at ......
+>> It is still in early stages, with I would guess about 400 - 500 lines of
+>> code.
+>> It works across ncurses, gtk and qt with a consistent interface, however
+>> there seems to be a bug in the libyui-qt libriaries which Angelo and
+>> Matteo will be looking into (Big thank you to those guys for packaging
+>> the libyui libraries and helping out when I have questions).
+> libyui has been choosen w/o real discussions, i don't want you to loose you time if
+> at final we don't choose it.
+
+There were discussions both on mailing list and IRC, a proposal was 
+written and accepted. I'm not sure what extra discussion is required?
+
+One of the biggest critisims the first time this was discussed, was that 
+such a rewrite has been suggested many times in the past, but the amount 
+of discussion out weighed the amount of code. Now that I have actually 
+written some code there is a call for more discussion.
+
+Don't worry about me loosing time, if it does not become a Mageia 
+project it will become my own private project, and if any distro sees 
+potential I will work with them, other wise I will just do it for myself.
+
+>> I have little time to work on this for the next 6 weeks, but I hope to
+>> have the core system complete, or near to complete when Santa visits,
+>> though porting (and adding new) modules will be the bigger task.
+> better work would be to fix existing one and add new interactive::qt ( or qt4 ).
+> And seeing the != between qt4 and qt5 the port to qt5 will be a 'piece of cake'.
+>
+
+I disagree entirely. The existing mcc makes ncurses a second rate 
+citizen. The main reason I started this project was that when I was 
+putting a cluster together I realised with a couple of extra modules, it 
+would be trivial to do it all in mcc. When I actually had a look at the 
+ncurses version it was incomplete, not all modules are shared, and the 
+interface was not consistent. The work that would be required to "fix 
+the existing one" amounts to writing an abstraction layer and then 
+rewriting mcc, using libyui elimated the first part (which is also the 
+largest part).  I also looked at writing a module anyway, and found docs 
+and tutorials lacking.
+
+There are a number of reasons why libyui is the right choice, even 
+though we may have to extend it ourselves, but I have already had this 
+discussion so don't want to lay it all out here again. Please see the 
+proposal and mail archives.
+
+
+One last but very important point. This is very much in its infancy! 
+While I hope it will go all the way, the reality is that projects 
+sometimes fail. I will work to prevent that, but some times life gets in 
+the way. My point is, I don't want to waste time on endless discussions 
+if it was never going to really make it anyway. My plan is to keep 
+writing small snippets of code when I get the chance, and once semester 
+is finished, have more of a go and see where it leads. The time used for 
+this email for instance, could have been spent working on the module 
+launching section, or helping Angelo with the window title bug. If 
+putting it into the Mageia repo is going to be a big deal, I'd rather 
+just keep working in silence.
+
+Regards
+
+Tuxta
+