The next MCC and Drak tools

[tuxta]

WIth the release of Mageia 2 (in fact, on the day of the release), I used it to set up a computing cluster for the IT department of my University. (20 nice shiny new machines).

A lot of the set up was handled very very nicely, particularly on the controller/gateway by MCC, but there were some very obvious deficiencies that really don't have any easy fix, and I would like to start discussions on how these issues could be addressed in the long term, bandaid fixes are fine for short term, but I think a grander view may be worth considering.

The main problem
Curses version is a second rate citizen, and Gui is all GTK

MCC is great, and I would love to be able admin using it regardless of whether I am using text interface or gtk/qt.
The interface is completely different in curses than gtk interfaces.
Alot of the tools are not available in curses interface, for instance, I dont see a way to install software or managing repositories.
It would be nice to have qt version as well as gtk (not a major issue, but would be nice)

Possible solution
I have thought how this could be addressed and feel that in the long term, the best solution would be to have the interface layer abstracted. So when developing a module, you use the mcc UI library, so you may call for instance mccGui.pushButton then if you are running in curses it creates a curses button, if you are in KDE it creates a QPushButton, if you are in Gnome it creates a GTKButton. This would take a great deal of work, so I started looking around to find any existing libraries. The first place I looked was openSuSE as Yast does exactly what I am describing. In yast, the interface is layed out and works the same way whether you are using curses, Gtk or KDE. To my surprise they have put a lot of work into seperating their Ui library from the Yast tools. You can use the library to write curses/gtk/qt programs that use the appropriate widget as needed, independent of Yast.
We could use the Yast Back end, and adapt our front end to use it. This option would take the least amount of work, as there are perl bindings to the yast libraries, and so it would only be the gui layer that would need reworking. The current gtk only modules could become curses/qt/gtk modules by changing the gtk calls to yast backend calls.

Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that we port Yast to Mageia, I am suggesting we use its Ui abstraction only. I use Mageia over openSuse for many reasons, but I do admire how well Yast works, and would love to see similar in Mageia. Perhaps we could start planning the next generation of MCC ??

Smaller problem
Missing Modules

WIth a couple more modules, the entire gateway, central authentication, clustering and batching system could have been set up in MCC.
This of course can be fixed by people (and I am pointing at myself here) contributing with said modules.
Just a quick note: Cluster scripts looked nice, but in practice is too limiting and is not appropriate for most of the clusters I have seen, its choice of software is somewhat dated as well.

What do you think?

What I have written is just my own thoughts, I would love to hear what others think.
If nothing else, the Gui vs curses inconsistencies is something a number of people have commented on to me.
Are there any plans for the Next Generation MCC ??

[wobo]

Part of an answer:
Well, you must understand that some tools of the MCC are tools of their own and some are just a frontend of regular commandline tools and there are GUI tools which have a commandline equivalent. Most Draktools of the MCC have a ncurses "version". But the ncurses versions are only there if there is no real commandline tool with the same function.

Best example is rpmdrake. There is no ncurses GUI for that because on the commandline we have 'urpm*'.

[marja]

What I have written is just my own thoughts, I would love to hear what others think.
If nothing else, the Gui vs curses inconsistencies is something a number of people have commented on to me.
Are there any plans for the Next Generation MCC ??

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

There are (still vague) plans to modernise MCC. If you didn't do so already, you might want to share your ideas on the mageia-dev ml.
Besides, there is an "ideas" page in our wiki https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_Ideas_Page

However, if you're the same tuxta who is being trained to become a packager: At the moment, ideas for the specifications for Mageia 3 are being collected, please read the meeting log of last packager's meeting http://meetbot.mageia.org/mageia-dev/2012/mageia-dev.2012-05-30-19.13.html (don't forget to follow the links) and attend next meeting.

Cheers
marja

[tuxta]

Thanks for the info marja.

I will follow up on your suggestions. Not sure M3 is a realistic goal, but certainly would like to make some plans.
I am the Tuxta who is in the training programe
While I would love to attend the next meeting, in my neck of the woods that is usually about 4am, so not very workable.

I will canvas the ml and irc and see what support there is. May also consider just making a start in a month or so and see where it goes.

Thanks again

[marja]

Thanks for the info marja.

I will follow up on your suggestions. Not sure M3 is a realistic goal, but certainly would like to make some plans.
I am the Tuxta who is in the training programe
While I would love to attend the next meeting, in my neck of the woods that is usually about 4am, so not very workable.

I will canvas the ml and irc and see what support there is. May also consider just making a start in a month or so and see where it goes.

Thanks again

yw
Proposals for Mageia 3 specifications can only be made till June 15th. If the decision is taken to improve MCC, I doubt there is much chance of MCC being changed again for Mageia 4.
https://www.mageia.org/pipermail/mageia-dev/2012-May/016004.html

[doktor5000]

This is a valid proposal, and actually needed since a long time in my opinion. That way we could also have a QT interface which has been requested before often.

[dave]

I think can be a big deal a restyle of rpmdrake too. Maybe we can use another package manager gui or create it.
For example drak-X11 is already perfect.

[doktor5000]

Why should we use another package manager gui or create a new one? What is it lacking currently?

[dave]

Drakrpm isn't the figure of easiness and can be better with some right adjustments

[doktor5000]

Well, what is not easy, and what adjustments would make it better in your opinion? Give some specific examples, please.

[wobo]

An improvement I could think of is with the update GUI.
As it is now it shows the list of available updates in alphabetical order without any distinction. How about splitting this list in 3 sections:
1. Security updates - maybe somehow marked red
2. Bugfix updates - maybe marked green
3. Other (if there are others, depending on update policy)

Klicking on one of the list entries could open an additional field below with a description of the reason for update (changelog, etc.). This is already implemented I think.

With rpmdrake I do not see anything to improve in the GUI (judging from my individual POV), but the performance is still "lousy". Each step takes too long, especially the first one (where the list of installed packages is read). But I do not have a solution for that, it's only a wish.

[jkerr82508]

An improvement I could think of is with the update GUI.
As it is now it shows the list of available updates in alphabetical order without any distinction. How about splitting this list in 3 sections:
1. Security updates - maybe somehow marked red
2. Bugfix updates - maybe marked green
3. Other (if there are others, depending on update policy)

IIRC, in the early days of Mandrake, when rpmdrake was used to apply updates, that is how they were displayed. In fact, the first drop down list in rpmdrake implies that this can still be done. I don't know how rpmdrake differentiated among the different types of update and have never checked to see if this actually works in Mageia.

Jim

[wobo]

Yes, in rpmdrake you can display a list of updates, security updates, etc. But that's not what I meant. I actually meant the GUI which pops up when you click on the exclamation mark in the systray.

[doktor5000]

The problem with the update applet is that there's a long outstanding bug, because currently even the advisories which packagers have to write to get update candidates validated by QA won't be shown to the enduser, as there's no tool/infrastructure for packagers to get them on the mirrors somehow: https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2223
The distinction between types of updates/colour-coding would be a nice sideeffect if we'd get such a tool.

[wobo]

And then there are the languages....
It's a long standing and very heavy task, never completed: translation of the package descriptions in rpmdrake. This would be a real improvement for all people who do not speak English (a large part of the world wide crowd).

And then there is the default filter:
It has been an annoyance for quite some time now, the default filter setting to "Programs with GUI" instead of "All". I understand the intention of some people to keep users away from the commandline as much as they can. But this has nothing to do with it. You can read enough cases in the forum where you tell people to install this or that library and they keep coming back with "Mageia rpmdrake does not offer this package".

[dave]

also cannot stand that rpmdrake should always reload the information every time you click on a package. would be better if it loaded all the data at the beginning (like yast for opensuse)