Sunday, May 13, 2007

Solview, JPack

Last week I added contents file parsing to solview.

More recently, Michal Pryc announced that he was working on JPack, an easy software manager and installer written in Java.

Now, the current focus of these tools is slightly different - solview is about analysing what your system has, JPack aims to make adding new software painless.

I was planning to add package management to solview at some point, but probably won't bother now - there seems little point in duplicating the work in JPack so I could just reuse that, and hopefully I'll be able to contribute to JPack as well.

Motivated by the rather better look of the GUI in JPack, I had a little go at reorganising the layout in solview so that the package list is done as a table. It does look better. I also did some refactoring of the code - both to make it more usable by other projects (such as JPack), and to remind myself how it all worked.

So there's a new version of solview now available, with the above mentioned refactoring and layout changes, and with the slow operations done in the background with a SwingWorker.

Monday, May 07, 2007

solview - includes contents

A little bit of work this weekend and I've let out a new version of solview.

No sign of the promised jumpstart profile builder, though.

But what is present now is a contents file parser. This allows me to add a summary of the number of files and space used to each package (and to each cluster). For example:



And in addition I added a filesystem browser so you can choose a file and see what packages and clusters it's included in:



There's a slight amount of lunacy involved in parsing the contents file. Don't be surprised to see OutOfMemory errors, as the memory usage is fairly high (several hundred meg, commonly).