Re: [Nautilus-list] RPM viewing

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On Tuesday, July 10, 2001, at 10:29  AM, Jonathan Blandford wrote:

> Indeed, though I got a little disheartened when I realized that
> trilobite has a pretty big dependency on ammonite, and it isn't
> apparently easy at all to extract the RPM viewer from this code.  Given
> that ammonite is completely deprecated, and trilobite is pretty
> unmaintained, I'm not sure how useful this code is.

I think trilobite is in pretty good shape. But the entire concept of it, 
where it gets dependency information and packages from the Eazel service, 
may be obsolete.

On the other hand, the package manager abstraction layer is a nice idea. I 
don't know how well it was implemented, but I thought that Eskil had the 
right idea there.

> Would it make sense to try to extract the relevant bits from it and try
> to create a nautilus-package-view module?  Is anyone interested in
> maintaining such a thing?  Or is trilobite interesting enough that it
> can be cleaned up and used?

I think it's pretty easy to make a standalone Nautilus RPM view from the 
old sources. If you look at older Nautilus sources, you can probably even 
find a pre-trilobite version in there that might help you figure out how 
to change it back so it calls RPM directly.

The next level of sophistication is to preserve the package manager 
abstraction layer. In that case, you'd probably have two packages: one for 
the package manager independence library, and another for the package view 
(although you could cram them into one for starters).

Everything gets much more exciting when you can wire into a package 
repository or updater like the old Eazel software catalog or the Red 
Carpet service or the Red Hat updating service. A really fancy level would 
be to make the package manager abstraction library also abstract some of 
the things that these services can do, so that the RPM view can be a point 
of entry into any of these services.

I don't think any of these tasks are prohibitively difficult. I think it 
just depends on your appetite.

    -- Darin