[Mageia-dev] The shiny new Control Center

Steven Tucker tuxta2 at gmail.com
Sat Sep 29 14:14:03 CEST 2012


Hi everyone,

I have been doing a little work on the proposed control center - mcc2

https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Feature:UiAbstraction4mcc

and would like to put a couple of questions forward to find some direction.


1/ What should we call it ??

         I have been using mcc2 as a working name, however I'm not 
convinced this is the right approach. I will soon be uploading the code 
(been using my own svn repo up till now), and it would be good to start 
with the name it will stick with. Should the name relate to Mageia?, or 
should it be more generic?

2/ What languages should be available for writing modules? (Perl, C++, 
python and Ruby are possibilities)

         So far mcc2 has been written in Perl (even though I had never 
written a line of Perl prior to starting this) so as to make porting 
existing modules a matter of just replacing the Ui calls, but I do like 
the idea of allowing the modules to be written in more than 1 language 
to encourage more contributors who may be turned off by having to learn 
another language.
Sticking with Perl will make mcc2 core easier, so I may do that 
initially regardless. What do you all think?? Is sticking with 1 
language preferred even if it means less contributors, or is the goal to 
attract as many module developers as possible?

3/ What should the license be?
         I would be happy to make it GPL V3, but is there any argument 
for something different ?

4/ As an official Mageia project, do I need to sign the copyright over 
to Mageia ??
         I am more than happy to do so, I would only ask that I get 
noted somewhere as the developer, hopefully others will join the 
developer list as well.


Just to give you an idea of where my code is at ......

It is still in early stages, with I would guess about 400 - 500 lines of 
code.
It works across ncurses, gtk and qt with a consistent interface, however 
there seems to be a bug in the libyui-qt libriaries which Angelo and 
Matteo will be looking into (Big thank you to those guys for packaging 
the libyui libraries and helping out when I have questions). It reads 
all the Category and Module information from a config file then 
generates a menu of the categories and alters the view of modules 
depending on which category is selected (think of the existing mcc, but 
much uglier). I have written and launched a test module, however I did 
not like the way I did it, so have scrapped that and will come back to 
it next week.

I have little time to work on this for the next 6 weeks, but I hope to 
have the core system complete, or near to complete when Santa visits, 
though porting (and adding new) modules will be the bigger task.

Cheers

Tuxta



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