This years Google Sumer of Code, student Peter Libič tried to implement an idea of Migrating Assistant. MacOSX contains a utility which can import users, application settings and various files from old Macintosh to new one. Idea to port this functionality to Linux is not new. Something similar was created during GSoC two years ago by Ubuntu, but we tried to use different approach (object oriented C++) so the code is better extendable and maintainable.
I finally implemented very important feature of scout: It is now able to search for binaries in all enabled zypp repositories. SAT-solver files are used for this, so user does not have to install any external index files.
A lot has happened since the public release of scout. Blogpost registered more than 400 hits, Marek Stopka created bash-completion, Thomas Schraitle wrote docbook documentation and Michal Vyskocil prepared module for python and its indexes. Thank you all!
Hooray! The first public version of Scout was just released. It is a simple tool which allows user to look for (not yet installed) packages using simple queries (e.g. which autoconf macros does the package contain, which Java classes are present inside or what binaries does the package provide). Scout is available in openSUSE BuildService in home:prusnak:scout project. If you would like to install and test it, follow these three steps:
You might have heard about my older project called command-not-found. Right now it is implemented as SQLite database which contains only table(binary, path, package). (I’m going to rewrite it, so that it makes use of the new SAT solver files, but this is not the topic of this blogpost).
We decided to restructure and cleanup the games projects in the openSUSE Build Service. Before the change we had 8 projects for each game genre (action, adventure, arcade, board, puzzle, roleplay, strategy/realtime, strategy/turn-based) and one separate project for game libraries (so you can play games even on older distributions with obsoleted libraries). This situation was causing more harm than good, so now we will only have one “games” repository with all game genres together.
Hooray! My proposal for Migration Assistant project was picked by student Peter Libič and later accepted by Google as Summer of Code project for openSUSE. I’m looking forward to this collaboration and the new ideas that will surely come! :)
During Hackweek I implemented project command-not-found for openSUSE. Background: Debian and Ubuntu use patched bash, that allows to write handler, which is executed before “command not found” is written. That provides us a way we can help user in solving the problem.