[oi-dev] Tiny GUI for pkg

[benn]

Hi,
While writing doc on pkg for the Sysadmin manual, I created a bash
wrapper to cache 'pkg list -a' to speed things up. It grew. I
eventually added Zenity to get output on GTK windows with scroolbars.
It was a good way to really get to know pkg.

This Easter while cleaning up I realised that it might be possible to
to modify and write a Zenity GUI for pkg. This I did. The fine tuning
was the difficult part though; and not too much fun.

Results are here:
https://github.com/mebenn/zpkg.git

It is very simple and very alpha. It is the wrong way to go for a pkg
GUI (GTK with Python is very powerful: the old Solaris GUI I liked); so
I don't think it worth devoting too much time to developing it. I
wouldn't suggest making a pkg package for it either. However, you can
list, install, update and what not using it; which doesn't render it
entirely useless. Maybe someone will find it useful. Some things can be
easily added, other thinks not so easy; and not really worth the time.

The app is in bash (most certainly the wrong language for a GUI) and is
horribly menu orientated. I tried to minimise the amount of menus and I
optimised some menus away: it is not clean.
I've tested what I can, but expect a lot of things not to work. And
there are better things around than Zenity; but I never intended to
spend as much time as I did on it.

You can run it from a terminal or copy zpkg.desktop to
/usr/share/applications/, place the binary somewhere in PATH and run it
in Mate from  system->administration.
Help via zpkg -h.

Any questions, comments, require help, ... don't hesitate to ask.

Cheers
Benn

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