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to view packages or not to view packages -- that is, urm, a gentoo problem?
10/02/07 21:06 , Categories: gentoo So you read it in the title. Yes it sounds weird, by intention. When our primary site for package viewing went down some time ago, I didn't notice much. It was more a good friend of mine asking me if I know when it will be back. Okay, it was down for three days so no big deal if something serious happened. You know the rest of the story or can read it up on the bug (just don't comment there unless real help offered).
But why am I writing about this here? Well, also some time ago, araujo and me started something called gui project. Main target was obviously getting some nice gui for our day-to-day tasks. I don't really know where (maybe some mailinglist) it came to my ears that our obviously loved packages site was down more a month. So hey, we're a gui project, I more or less have finished my previous tinderbox thingy (just minor stuff open). So some spare time available. I never did a webpage yet with a python based framework so I decided to give some of them a try and if I would find a nice and not bloated one, this could be worth a try.
Two days of trying different ones later, I finally got settled with cherrypy and genshi (there's a nice tutorial on the genshi homepage if you're curious now)..
After some thinking about databases and stuff, finally got a db generator going resulting in data useful for such a site. That's the moment where I started to git the code and let the show begin. In the meantime I was on holiday for more than a week so you might notice some inactivity in the timeline. Anyway, at least startpage and some filtering works. See http://tinyurl.com/2fq9dw for working features of the live version at http://packages.gentooext.net
It's a starting project, mind you, though basics are working now, more stuff to come. If you have questions or comments, feel free to join irc.freenode.net #gentoo-guis , cookies are on topic 
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14 comments
If your code is saner/shorter than the old one, I don't see any reason why we can't just replace it outright ;-).
Much appreciated!
PLEASE avoid Javascript. I can browse all gentoo with Javascript, which I usually have off to protect myself, but for this I will need it as it seems.
>which I usually have off to protect myself, but for this I will
>need it as it seems.
Err no, there is no need for any javascript here. Maybe I will introduce some searchbox in ajax but that won't ever be a requirement.
> For my own education, why did you choose 'genshi'?
Well the 2 options in the end for me were cheetah and genshi. Cheetah has the advantage of pre-processing templates, rendering them as still-readable python code to save time.
Downside of it, when you look at the example at [1], it's not fully xml so stuff looks cluttered when viewing it un-processed.
Second thing was that due to maintaining another two websites with xml/xslt (also gentoo does this), I'm used to XPath, XInclude and whatnot and cheetah doesn't support it that easily.
Uncached pageviews take slightly longer to generate with genshi than with cherrypy but cherrypy has sane caching, so I'm with it this time.
[1] http://www.cheetahtemplate.org/examples.html
If you could implement that, i wouldn't have to visit gentoo-portage and packages.gentoo all the time, and packages.gentoo would be so awesome :)
Am I correct in thinking there was a search capability on packages.gentoo.org? Would be very useful on packages.gentooext.net.
Or have I missed something?
One more thing that I miss is categories list.
PS Can't have email in gmail?
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