The GSoC roundup of OPYUM

This the mandatory final post on GSoC and the project where I was a mentor. I think Debarshi would be writing in about his own experiences, but here’s an update from my side. The submitted proposal for GSoC had the following goals:

+ a process to import/export different profiles on a system and switch between them so that “YumPacks” could be created for different target systems

+ ability to create YumPacks, containing all the dependencies for installing/updating a set of packages on a particular system, which can be easily carried around in any offline media

+ ability to install/update a bunch of packages from a YumPack

+ package the program for inclusion into the Fedora repository

The current release has achieved the first two objectives – installation/updation of packages from a YumPack is performed by extracting the RPMs from the YumPack and using system-install-packages to install/update the RPMs. The package has also been submitted for review.

Coming up next are:

+ getting YumPacks to be directly recognised by system-install-packages

+ backing up /var/cache/yum to be reused by Yum

+ improvements to the UI, better error handling

So, what were the “wish we could have done” things ? Well,

– more testing : Opyum needs to be more aggressively tested across various UseCases

– issue/bug/rfe tracker: should be perhaps handled through the bugzilla if the package review is a +

– handling of non en_US locales: there’s a bug on this if you are interested in tracking

– better UI: the current UI is just functional

– localization

All summed up, it’s been good to see Opyum develop and get to the package review stage. Thanks Debarshi for the wonderful ride.

Dear Lazyweb…

Dear Lazyweb,

An old friend of mine who’s teaching a few kids about learning how to solve problems by computers called in with a query for which I had no answer. The question was “what is the alternative to Microsoft Agent in Linux or even applications on Linux ?” More on Microsoft agent is here. It will be awesome if someone could point me towards a proper answer on this one. The mail address is sankarshan dot mukhopadhyay at gmail dot com.
Thanks.

ps: Thanks to a wonderful person my blog now gets syndicated here too.