[Winlibre-developer] SOC 2006 project

[Stephanie B. <ste...@ho...>]

Hi,
I know I should send the proposal to Google on May 1st, but I want to run it 
by you to get some early feedback if that's ok.

I'm interested in the  "WinLibre Distribution, Python based" project. I'm a 
WinLibre user and a big Python fan. I studied the SOC 2005 projects 
extensively and I think it would be very interesting to combine them to a 
coherent suite. I noticed a lot of duplication between some of the projects 
and different approaches to the same problems. I belive I can add value by 
taking the best pieces from different projects and organize them in a 
sensible way.

According to my evaluation the most mature projects are ControlCenter and 
Updater. Both of them worked for me, have good architecture and are 
documented pretty well. BertrandPythonInstaller and Manatee seem to need 
some more work, but have some interesting features aspects.

Here is a summary of my proposal:

* Use Control Center as the basis to the PYthon WinLinbre distribution
* Integrate the Updater's client as the active component for keeping the 
distribution up to date
* Run the Updater's server as the server-side
* Investigate using PyCurl (idea from BertrandPythonInstaller) for downloads 
instead on the proprietaryUpdater's FileDownloader
* Add admin interface to the Server (borrow ideas from Manatee)

Here is my evaluation of the SOC2005 core projects:

BertrandPythonInstaller
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* No installation instructions
* No documentation
* No comments in code
* Missing pycurl (3rd party package). Had to install manually.
* After pycurl installation program ran with no problems

* Package selection screen is pretty spartan (you can select multiple 
packages but you can't tell which package is selected)
* When moving to next step the progress screen says 'Downloading Gimp', but 
it's trying to install all kind of other programs.
* There is no good sense of progress (no time, no percentage, no diference 
between download and install time)
* Program has no icon or title and doesn't show up on taskbar in Windows, so 
if it hides behind another window it's a problem to find it.
* There is no update server!!!. It seems that the program works only when 
reading from a local distribution XML file. Basically, this is just an 
installer. There is no logic to connect to an update server and get updated 
distribution files.

Updater
~~~~~~~
* Good modularity
* Easy to follow architecture
* Some comments
* Some documentation (Client/readme.html is great for developers)

* slick GUI (good tree-based selection of packages, nice integrated progress 
bar in the main window)
* Cool taskbar icon
* Has Client,Server and Admin modules
* No clean way to stop the server. Server doesn't respond to CTRL+C
* Seems to be really working

Manatee
~~~~~~~
* Weird project. Looks promising but very rough.
* There are 3 modules: Core,ControlCenter and Installer. All the of each 
module is lumped together in one big __init__.py file that contains many 
classes and functions. Hard to navigate and understand the architecture
* The GUI is nice but too crowded and opens too many windows and popups. It 
also contains lots of debug features.
* Poor documentation
* There are many admin scripts but not enough instructions on how to use 
them all
* Couldn't get it to work completely. I was able to select 1 or 2 packages 
from a distribution of 2 packages but the download/installation failed

ControlCenter
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* Good architecture (extensible plugin-based)
* Good modularity
* Good documentation
* Professional looking GUI (HTML-based)
* Nice art
* Has binary installer

* Couldn't run it initially from source since it depends on the win32 
extensions
* The application launcher (welcome tab) is excellent. It detected the 
WinLibre programs I had installed and launched them properly.
* The search tab is very nice too, although it opens an external browser.
* The news tab failed
* The gallery tab works, but it's very basic and probably it's better to 
have a standalone picture gallery program in WinLibre


Best Regards, Stephanie Block

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