For the past few months I have been working on a so-called "offline package management tool" for Fedora. The basic idea behind this tool has been laid out in the proposal I had submitted for Google Summer of Code 2007. Hence I shall desist from repeating what has already been said.
Two command line prototypes down the line, the final GUI application is finally taking shape. Now would be a good time to pause, step back and evaluate and let the world know what has been going on. In fact there has been a lot of criticism about the lack of publicly available information about the current state of affairs.
Unlike the previous command line prototypes, the GUI version does not import the YUM modules directly. It uses the core Pirut modules, which are in turn based on the YUM API, to do most of the work. The GUI interface is also based on Pirut's, with the necessary extra components separately designed for the offline counterpart.
These decisions resulted from my desire to merge with Pirut at some point of time. Whether that will ultimately happen is something I can not guarantee right now. It depends on what the Fedora community, especially Jeremy Katz (Pirut maintainer), think of it.
However the Pirut modules hide away many of the reconfigurability options offered by the underlying YUM API. eg., one could not change the 'installroot', and there was no way you could just download the packages and not install them. This has now been fixed by a patch against Pirut 1.3.7, and will be available to the public once Pirut 1.3.9 gets released.
The next objective was to incorporate the extra GUI bits into the existing Pirut interface that would be required by the offline manager to carry out its activities. eg., interfaces to import & export profiles and other profile management activities, installation from a selected yumpack, etc..
As of now the profile management interfaces have been designed, and their callback methods integrated into the code base.
These include modifications to 'file' and 'edit' menus; a couple of instances of gtk.FileChooserDialog to handle the selection of profiles to be imported or exported; progress bars to track the import & export activity; and an all-purpose dialog to manage the profiles.
It has been one of my personal grudges against YUM and Pirut that they do not provide any interface to modify the yum.conf and *.repo files. Pirut is even worse. It does not even provide a GUI counterpart to YUM's --enablerepo and --disablerepo command line options. Funnily there exists a number of stand alone GUI and CLI applications which do offer such functionality. eg.. system-config-repo, repoman, yumex (GUI tools), and the Red Carpet User tool interface to YUM (CLI tool).
Jeremy Katz is game for including such a feature in Pirut, but the best way to do it would be to put in the file handling infrastructure in the YUM API so that yet another tool need not reinvent the wheel to do the job. A patch is already doing the rounds in the yum-devel list, while the GUI part of it is slowing taking shape.
I am keeping my fingers crossed for the time being, and awaiting any feedback that you may have.
