Planet SoC

I finally got back from Switzerland. Google invited all the Summer of Code students to visit their offices. I chose to go to the Zurich one. It wasn’t the closest (London was) but it was the largest and it had more engineers than MBAs.

It has been very interesting meeting other Summer of Code participants from all Europe and a lot of other people of the free software community. There were about 40 people overall for the meeting at Google, along with free beer, cake and nice food.

I’m going to the Google Europe Headquarters in Zerich, Switzerland, tomorrow (July 10th).
Google is inviting us Summer of Code students, which is really nice.
I should be there in the middle of the afternoon from Paris.
I’ll be wearing a Slashdot tshirt. Drop me a mail or a comment if you go too so we can meet!

New status update!
Here’s what Aptitude looks like:

(more screenshots after the break)
I’ve been exploring how the APT libraries work and how to interact with the aptitude back-end and here’s what it can do now:

New status update!
Here’s what Aptitude looks like:

(more screenshots after the break)
I’ve been exploring how the APT libraries work and how to interact with the aptitude back-end and here’s what it can do now:

Sometimes people propose other solutions to have the Aptitude-gtk project done, like :
I’d have thought that the most interesting way of doing aptitude-gtk would be to write a gtk backend for libcwidget. -Karellen
As this might be of interest to more people, I’ll repost Daniel Burrows‘ response :
Although I can see where you’re coming from, a GTK+ backend to cwidget would have no significant upsides and significant downsides.
The main upside to doing that from a practical point of view is that you would have only one piece of “driver” code for the GTK+ and curses interfaces. You wouldn’t have to rewrite the entire interface from scratch to create a GUI frontend.

I promised to post some updates about how the Aptitude project would be going so here it is.
Here’s what aptitude-gtk currently looks like :

Well, nothing very special right now. It’s really only a testing interface. The final GUI will probably be different. Now you may be interesting by what’s going on behind it ?
Where to start ?
Aptitude is written in C++ with varying dosages of OO coding depending on the age of the code :).

I’ve been reading my blog and it looks like I’ve not been very active.
It’s not totally untrue.
I’ve been very busy (and still am) with final exams and should be freed on May 28th, at 13:30 GMT precisely.
Not that I haven’t done anything. I have a lot of design ideas written on napkins. I concluded that pencils doesn’t write very well and fountain pens tend to be.. fountains. So, I have a stack on napkin-sized UI designs on a corner of my desk.
As for the request for ideas, I have some specific questions I’d like to have an opinion on. Here’s one: how far away from the ncurse interface should the GTK+ interface be ? To be more precise, we could take the example of keyboard bindings. Should I try to keep the same bindings ?