Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

[JontheEchidna]

Re: Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

Oh, and I just noticed you said you ran muon as sudo...

There's no need to do that thanks to the Polkit framework.

You can run it as a normal user, and it will only prompt you for your password when you either try to check for updates or try to install something. A lot more convenient if you just want to search for info about a package, and a bit more secure as less of the program is running as root. I'd recommend just running it as a normal user, personally.

[askrieger]

Re: Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

I'm glad to see the option to learn about packages without having to obtain root privileges (or do some web surfing). Good decision on your part. Thanks!

[GreyGeek]

Re: Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

I installed Kubuntu Maverick as a guest OS in VB. After all the usual updates I went to your ppa page and updated sources.list using the command line. Then I issued
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install muon

It installed without any complaints, but did NOT put an option in the menu (which may be my issue). Anyway, I hit Alt-F2 and in the command line box entered: sudo muon

After installing any KDE app, you have to run kbuildsycoca4 or log out/back in before it will show up. A bit annoying, yes, but nothing I can do about it from my end. :/

I noticed the Muon menu option under System after I logged back into the guest host.

It came up without any problems. I played with it for a while and noticed an item that needs addressing:
1) I could not find a menu option add or remove a repository, or to reload one if I could.

Yeah, I plan to make a menu entry to launch good ol’ software-properties-kde in there soon enough. (It’s the repository manager that both Adept and KPK use in Kubuntu) It’d be nice to have a custom solution for that, but that will probably take time. To reload existing repositories, simply check for updates. (That does the same thing.)

and I have a wish:

2) The BIG weakness in Synaptic (and KPackageKit) is that only the currently installed driver or the next version of it can be installed. IF the next version is installed all references to the previous version are lost, which makes it impossible (via a gui) to REVERT to the previous version. Ergo, it would be nice that when a package is upgraded the previous package reference is stored to allow a quick reversion to it if the update is not satisfactory.

Actually, Synaptic does have a way to downgrade package versions. It’s just not completely obvious how to do that from a cursory view at its UI. You have to go to the “Package” menu, and if there is an alternate version still available, you’ll be able to downgrade it. This is something still on the todo list for LibQApt, but it is definitely planned to happen.

Snowhog and I discovered that not all packages have "downgrades" available in the repository a few months ago. I've wondered if that was to save repository disk space or that nobody made much of a point of it. I ran SuSE for about 5 years and YAST and YAST2 kept the previous version in the repository for all packages. Also, some package upgrades cause such changes that downgrading would be like rolling back the whole desktop (which happened to me in Knoppix a couple times!).

Anyway, What is in Muon is working great! I'll keep pounding on it.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

Oh, and I just noticed you said you ran muon as sudo...

The first time I ran it I didn't use sudo, the second and subsequent times I did.

There's no need to do that thanks to the Polkit framework.

Didn't know that.

You can run it as a normal user, and it will only prompt you for your password when you either try to check for updates or try to install something. A lot more convenient if you just want to search for info about a package, and a bit more secure as less of the program is running as root. I'd recommend just running it as a normal user, personally.

Thanks for the tip, I'll do that from now on!

[Fintan]

Re: Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

I installed it yesterday on my lucid kde4.5 testing.

Many thanks

Everything said above pertains to me as well so I won't dwell on that.

Just a thought.
Muon has categories and status tabs which are neat and clean.

How about a source tab to show the repos / ppa's being used?
Maybe also a option to block a apps status (keep it from being updated).

I am sure this will become a very active thread soon enough

[JontheEchidna]

Re: Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

Filtering by package origin is planned too. I just want to figure out how Software Center gets it's nice, human-readable names from, as opposed to Synaptic's comparatively "raw" names it retrieves for the archives/PPAs.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

I installed a package using Muon and noticed that during the installation of the package the progress was shown one line at a time.

Did I miss a setting which allows the entire progress (all lines showing) to be viewed? Showing only one line of progress at a time is one of many reasons why I don't use KPackageKit. Showing the progress of the installation the way Synaptic can do would be nice in the cases where the progress stops to allow the user to enter a preference (usually "do you want to keep the old configuration file ..") It also allows judging the overall progress and to see individual package percentages, etc...

[JontheEchidna]

Re: Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

That is a somewhat limited form of progress messages retreived by connecting "dpkg --status-fd" to the dpkg process running the install. (man dpkg has some details on how that all works.) That's some trippin' black magic junk as it is, and getting the raw output of the dpkg process as it appears in the terminal is even darker black magic. I will have to figure out how to support this, and I will definitely implement the feature, if I am capable of coding it.

I do have some development updates on what I've done yesterday and today. On the LibQApt side of things, I fixed a bug where in the dependencies tab, versioned "Replaces:" entries would be cut off if they contained a "<" symbol in them, because that is usually interpreted as the start of an HTML tag. I also removed the intermediary file paths for the installed files list. (You'd see "/usr", "/usr/bin/", "/usr/bin/konversation", but now you'll just see "/usr/bin/konversation") I also fixed a localization error in the dependencies tab, where translations would appear as garbled text.

On the Muon side of things, I added a menu item to launch good ol' software-properties-kde in the Settings menu. (Settings -> Configure Software Sources) You can now edit repositories just like you always have been able to in Adept and KPackageKit.

[sithlord48]

Re: Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

Its Great to see some one is finally making a good package manager for KDE4, and for a two week old project it looks great. can't wait for it to be installed and set up in my mm vbox.

[JontheEchidna]

Re: Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

A lot of the work really did go in to the backend, LibQApt, which I started around three months ago. The GUI is 2 and a half weeks old, though. :P

[vinnywright]

Re: Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

NICE .......like a Qt synaptic but fits right in to KDE .........I'm likeing it so far.

havent acualey used it....exept for a quick test with 1 game.........that dident work so I purged it then instaled with synaptic .....and it still dident work so purged it agin.....

BUT it did a great seartch (just like synaptic) and gives all the usfull info you'd expect.

I dident add your PPA just dled every thing and instaled with GDebi ..........but I think it's a keeper so I'm heded back to add it ......with the Muon .......MMUUuuuuuu.

eney way get the pining and downgrading readey and it'l be the bomb for KDE.

VINNY

[vinnywright]

Re: Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

just added you'r PPA ..... @JontheEchidna with Muon ..........varey painless even installed the key with no queshtons & verey fast.

this one ..........hope that's right

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/echidnaman/staging/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/echidnaman/staging/ubuntu lucid main

I am going to just use it for a wile and see what we see

but so far I love it.

VINNY

[Snowhog]

Re: Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

Just added his repository and installed Muon myself. Looks very nice.

[kyonides]

Re: Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

I quite like Muon for what I've seen so far, but I guess it could be important to get some extra download status bars to check which download is stalled or not, but I never liked them anyway.

[kubicle]

Re: Introducing Muon, a new Package Manager under Development by a Kubuntu Dev

@JontheEchidna:

Do you have a public "todo list/planned features" for muon/qapt somewhere?

I've tried muon, and the basic functionality seems solid, good job so far.

It's still missing a few features I find very convenient in Synaptic...but I don't want to bother you if these are already "in the works".