Well, tonight I thought I'd work on the views. This actually required a little more work, as the Django template engine is very different from the Quixote PTL engine. A bit of analyzing, copying, cutting and pasting and voila!

Recently I have been having fun learning Django. I thought a web front end to PkgWatch would make an interesting project. Enter PkgWeb. PkgWeb is just that, a web frontend to PkgWatch, though PkgWatch is (still) completely independent of PkgWatch. Keeping them seperate allows me to work on them independently, but it also helped me realze some design flaws I had made with PkgWatch and so I've been improving PkgWatch as I go along.

PkgWeb is far from done, and do to my short attention span may never be. But I have already gotten most of what I wanted to see done in just a few days. I'm able to get a listing of the Sites, then I can delve into the sites and see what Products are hosted. For each product I can see what Releases were found and then look at the details for the release. This is pretty much the same stuff I did for packages.gentoo.org, especially with the P2 code which was never rolled out. In the case of PkgWeb, it is idepedant of the distro and pretty much has the same functionality.

I may release PkgWeb (and PkgWatch) if it ever matures and if anyone shows an interest. In the mean time I'm having fun developing it and especially learning about all the cool things Django is capable of.

A good example of one of these "noisy" utilities is Gentoo's emerge utility. By far the most annoying "feature" is the spinner. In my opinion spinners should only be used in web browsers and X cursors (if there). Definitely not in command-line utilities and definitely not by default. There is, of course, the --nospinner flag, but this should rather be renamed as --replace-annoying-spinner-with-annoying-dots.

There is, of course the --quiet flag. In my previous experience --quiet seemed to be only useful when used with emerge --sync (ironically, adding --quiet to PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS does not work. But now it appears that --quiet does work to suppress some other forms out output, for example error messages which is what one usually does not want to be suppressed. If your portage tree, for example, has inconsistent digest files and you attempt to emerge --quiet a package, emerge will silently fail to install the package. You have to figure out it did this, and then re-emerge without the --quiet flag to actually see what the error was. How annoying is that?! This isn't nit-picking. Errors should never be silenced unless done so by explicitly redirecting stderr. That's one Unix design concept that should never be broken.

A desirable feature for emerge would be something like, for example rm -i. emerge has a similar --ask flag and I find it very useful. If you use it with the --verbose flag you even get to see what USE flags are in effect for a given package. But, understandably, you can't use the --verbose and --quiet flags simultaneously and so if you want to see the USE flags you must also put up with the spinner.

emerge also, by default, spits out copious amounts of messages regarding patches being applied, files being installed/removed, tests being applied, QA and debug messages, etc. These, in my opinion, are more appropriately left silent unless a --verbose or even --debug flag was passed. It could benefit from Python's logging utility which gives the user/programmer a lot of flexibility over what gets printed (and where). Of course all this output scrolls by, and users either cannot or choose not to read them. Meanwhile, important einfo strings get lost in the print storm. This is not only annoying, it's downright frustrating.

Surprisingly, things like this are not solely emerge issues. There are other "new style" utilities with the same behavior: by default the stdout pipe is connected to the kitchen sink and then they try to make up for it by providing a --quiet convenience flag, but this flag many times suppresses errors. This seems to be a sign of the times. Maybe I'm just old fashioned.

Result of mthemer --set ish_gtk --set ish_metacity --options=factor=0.8 random random

$ cat Hell.sh
# using alsa & dmix...
sleep 1
mpg321 -q -o alsa "$1" &

$ find Music -name '*.mp3' -print |wc -l
141

$ find Music -name '*.mp3' -exec sh Hell.sh {} \;