I was busy with Pardus 2011 for a while (we released Pardus 2011 Beta last week), where I couldn’t find a chance to write about development process. You will see great improvements in the upcoming release; Pardus 2011 will be shipped with KDE 4.5.2 and a whole bunch of our management tools which are written with Python, PyQt and PyKDE. I guess the package-manager will be the most noteworthy one in all.
Pardus have its own package management system: PiSi (For more information about pisi you can checkout development page). Package-manager uses its backend. As you may remember from my previous posts, we are using an infrastructrure for managing operations called Çomar. Package-manager calls Çomar where it can check that if the user have necessary priveleges to use PiSi by using PolicyKit (which calls PolicyKitKde on KDE). You may see that this operation resembles KAuth. One can ask why we are using this method, instead of KAuth. Well, the simple answer is that this infrastructure is nearly 4 years old. :-)
Let’s look at the new features of package-manager…
The most significant change is the new interface where you may see that there are tabs similar to rekonq and chromium. Package-manager doesn’t have anything to offer in file menu but settings, so this menuless aspect works better for our needs and it saves a one line space, which is getting more and more important for netbooks and other small screen devices.
Another great improvement you may catch from the first screenshot is rating stars for packages. The rating option was a feature requested by our users for a long time. Since we kept them waiting so long, we thought that the solution should worth. We put out a new project called AppInfo which can work with any package management system. At the moment, only PiSi backend is completed but anyone can write a new backend for rpm, deb or any other package-manager of choice. AppInfo provides a rating for each package from its main database. Clients uses AppInfo API to check out the rating database from a predefined AppInfo server which provides screenshots and rating info for the requested package. Below you can see the information of package-manager in use.
In the last screenshot you may be interested in the overlayed widget. The trick is the PDS.Gui class. I’ve written about Pardus Desktop Services before. This Gui class is a new add-on for PDS aiming to improve usability. It also supports animated transitions which based on QTimeLine and to achieve an animation infrastructure similar to QPropertyAnimation. Using QPropertyAnimation was an option for sure, however I wanted to experience to create a basic animation framework with power of Qt. So this choice was totally personal… :-)
While integrating the new search mechanism to achieve an auto completion for packages, I used PDS.Gui as well.
I embedded the basket window and the progress dialog into the main window with PDS.Gui as well.
You may download Pardus 2011 Beta and check the new features.
Thanks for the fish…
Tags: planet.kde, planet.pardus























