decided to give kuroo a spin from a suggestion in irc. 9 minutes and 50 seconds after emerge, I start it from my menu. Was surprised to see kdesu pop up straight away - I expected kuroo to be similar to kcontrol, starting normally just fine for looking stuff up, and having a "administrate" button (or whatever) to ask for pass, become root and actually do stuff. Kuroo has an option to backup portage files (which is great), but doesn't allow the user to choose a location.. Took me a while to realise that the backup location was in the tooltip and not buried somewhere else, perhaps make that a bit clearer too :) Looks like there's a link or something above that, but I can only see one (or two) rows of the text's pixels making it almost invisible and quite unreadable. Cursor changed on mouseover but surprisingly no tooltip to tell me what it was supposed to be. I have some packages installed which are masked or no longer in portage (nethack, speedfreqd, couple others). kuroo brought up this message, but didn't list the guilty packages in the message. I had to go poking around to see what the error was about. Given that, I'm glad kuroo didn't take it as fatal and die. Next, I went to configure (which is always my first port of call when exploring a new program). I turned on deep, turned off system tray and went to see what kuroo thought of my make.conf. Appariently not much.. CHOST was fine, but CFLAGS was only -O2 -pipe when I have a huge list, CXXFLAGS was ${CFLAGS}, and USE was only ${USE} -flag -flag -flag when I have over 300 use flags listed, most enabling things - which is where I clued on to the fact that kuroo is simply searching my make.conf for lines starting with the variable name and taking the last one found instead of interpreting the file, and mangling everything as a result. Kuroo should correctly interpret multi-line variables and includes at least as correctly as bash and portage do. I see that the CFLAGS textarea is a multi-line entry box - why can't kuroo interpret multi-line variables? I'm surprised it doesn't understand ${VARIABLE} either, since they seem to be fairly common and I separate my enabled use flags from my disabled with one. What kind of state would it leave my make.conf in if I applied new settings? Would it close the quotes of my multi-line variables at the end of the first line, leaving chunks of random text everywhere? Would it exclude all but the last instance of any variables I've listed multiple times with includes, losing the majority of them? Would it remove comments I've added with alternate settings and notes to self? Far too much doubt for me to continue using this program as root. killed, checked that my configs were ok (they were) and started up as a user (I'm in portage group or I wouldn't even try). "help! I'm not root and feel useless!" message came up as expected, ticked "shush" and continued. My user's colour scheme exposes a problem with the search box - it uses my font colour (quite a light grey) but chooses it's own background, making it impossible to read. I think colours' luminance can never be within 1/2 of the available range if you want to choose your own background and still keep them readable, so if my font is 192/255, the background's luminance must be <= 64/255, and if my font is 16/255 the background must be >= 144/255. Either that or force *both* a background and a text colour. Playing around, I noticed that sorting by column worked for all columns but the "present in world file" one which sorted by package name instead of grouping all files present in the world file at the top or bottom of the list as expected. Download checkbox seemed to be erroneously enabled (but not checked) when I added a package to the queue, although other controls and menu entries I couldn't use as a user were (correctly) disabled. Step 1 Check installation button worked as expected, and step 2 didn't enable, also as expected. Considering I clicked justabout everything I could find in the program and that's all that wasn't right, I think kuroo makes a *huge* amount of information trivial to access, process, and assemble into an emerge plan, and I'm going to see if I can write patches for some of my issues to help kuroo be everything I could want from a gui package manager frontend, since it's fairly close already (although my C++ knowledge is even worse than my C). Once these issues are done, I vote for adding a use/input/video/etc flag browser/editor, then remote administration foo ;)
(In reply to comment #0) Sorry, but these observations should be reported to upstream (kuroo.org). We aren't upstream and therefore aren't going to fix them.
