Hello folks,
I'm proud to announce you (yet another) GUI for our lovely portage-system: Portato.
The current version of this package is 0.14.1 - the package can be found here: http://necoro.eu/portato
But some more details about what it exactly is, what it is not and how it works:
Portato is planned to help the user in situations where the command line is insufficient: For example when looking for a package, or when you want to see what packages are lying around in a category ... or when you have to install a greater package with lots of dependencies and even more use-flags. In this case you normally have to call "emerge -pv <pkg>" several times and edit package.use/package.keywords at the same time and have to see, what you are gaining. This is easier to handle with a graphical ui, because we have an Emerge Queue which updates automatically and shows dependencies. And you even can update USE-Flags on a per-package-base and the queue shows the changes.
Portato is not planned to replace the command line tools. Perhaps it might add some more gentoolkit-functions (like 'equery f') in the future, but it will not have a clickable interface for make.conf. Or it will be necessairy to check the files in /etc/portage regularly, because the software can not emulate a human brain
But what is so special about Portato? What is the difference to the other GUIs?
First a remark: To be honest, I have only tested kuroo so far - and this only for a short period of time. It may be, that some of the things I missed at that time, are fixed
Nevertheless, some points:
- Portato is written in Python, which makes it more flexible than C. And it allows to directly use the Portage-API w/o having to parse output.
- Portato does not need to have an extra database. It uses the db of portage.
- It will not screw up you files in /etc/portage like removing you comments and structure (a point I hated about kuroo). If it has to remove a line in one of this files, it will simply comment it out, with the hint, that this line was removed by Portato. Same for adding.
- Uses GTK as the frontend.
- Some more things I forgot

- Listing categories and the packages in them.
- Searching for a package.
- Listing details for packages.
- Setting use-flags.
- Emerge/Re-emerge/Un-emerge.
- Emerge --oneshot
- Interactive emerges (thus: emerges requiring user input)
- Masking / Unmasking / Keywording package (even a whole queue)
- Interactive searching
- Dialog showing updatable packages
- Do an emerge --sync
- Do an update [--deep] [--newuse] --world
- Ability to stop the emerge process
- Showing the ebuild with syntax highlighting
- Plugin system
- Systray and Desktop Entries
I am happy, if some of you think, that this might be worth a try and send me some remarks, bugs or whatever
Thanks for reading
Necoro




