Himerge could be an awesome Portage GUI, if...

[timpalpant]

it weren't written in Haskell.

Himerge is a new GUI for portage that looks very promising, however, it is definitely a bear to install. The dependency mess and ebuild issues with Haskell programs (they are currently transitioning from GHC-6.4 to GHC-6.6, remember GCC-3.3 to GCC-3.4 ?) makes it practically impossible to install. I spent an entire day and in the end I think I just got lucky.

In the end, I reccommend himerge for the very, very brave (although the people who are daring enough to get it to work probably despise GUIs). I hope it progresses and becomes stable.

That said, it is pretty nice and is a viable and useful GUI. It would be awesome if the Sabayon devs could compile and package it as a binary in the overlay. Even greater, I hope that they take the time to make a good GUI for entropy and don't write it off as unimportant. Himerge offers some good advice and concepts along those lines.

Check it out at: http://www.haskell.org/himerge/

Screenshot in Sabayon:
[img]
http://www.box.net/index.php?rm=box_v2_ ... f_78986927
[/img]

[totedati]

look good, gui screenshots is awesome ... i will check it ...

and for all of us you always can write here how you manage to install it ... ... just a suggestion ...

[WarraWarra]

Going to give it a try in virtualbox SL install , might be able to get this going somehow.

TY for the idea.

[Darksurf]

I'm emerging it now... It looks really good! I'd take that over portato and kuroo any day!!

[Eden]

I made a small guide to installing himerge. http://www.sabayonlinux.org/wiki/index. ... ll_Himerge

[Necoro]

Ok - I don't think, that my opinion is considered to be neutral. Nevertheless I will just state some bugs/lacks of features I found in himerge:

- no overlays: it seems like it just ignores it - could not find any package in an overlay
- only search complete package name
- no dependency tree
- seems not to find blocks
- no tooltips: what do these strange rectangles mean?
- no automatic unmasking
- no "oneshot" adding
- terminal uncolored and slow

(and from a developer's POV:
it parses eix/emerge output to get its result ...)

There are of course some things it has, what Portato lacks:
Himerge has a better frontend structure. I think I will adapt this in some points. And it has some nicier icons ^^. Additionally it has global useflag change support...

[totedati]

this means that is in a early development state, but still look good ... time to learn haskell

[araujo]

Hello,

It's good to know that Himerge is being used on distributions other than Gentoo ; and as long as these ones work with a vanilla-like portage there shouldn't be any problem at all.

Now, Himerge (as some of you have commented) is in an early stage of development; and one of the main goal of himerge is to show Haskell as a viable programming language for GUI's[1] , and how this choice could help for introducing new ideas into GUI's development ; so Haskell isn't really an arbitrarily chosen language for the application , it really plays an important role in its structure and design.

OK, that's just from a developer perspective, now from an user perspective, Himerge is intended to be a simple package manager front-end, offering a clean and straight-forward way of working around portage and some of its tools (like eix) , the main idea is that an user could access most (if not all) of the more important portage command line options, including operations like editing portage configuration files, from this GUI.

About the Himerge current status, we have made some progress on the Haskell team with the transition of ghc6.4 -> ghc6.6 lately , around one week ago we unmasked ghc6.6 and many of their packages, including Himerge , so right now the installation procedure should be more simpler than before:

# echo "=dev-lang/ghc-6.6.1" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
# echo "=dev-haskell/gtk2hs-0.9.11" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
# echo "=dev-haskell/himerge-0.13" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
# emerge himerge

This should be enough for now to get installed himerge , notice how the current version works with gtk2hs-0.9.11 only.

I expect to be releasing a new Himerge version very soon , it will bring many new improvements and it will work with the latest gtk2hs version on the tree too.

Well, I hope you enjoy using this application and don't doubt to send me bug reports

Regards,

[1] You can read more in my blog http://araujoluis.blogspot.com

[totedati]

good to see you here ... as you see sabayon linux need a real portage GUI, and kuroo still can't stand up to the standards, if you search more in sabayon forum you will see a lot of harsh words from some of dev's, but all of us have time constraints and can't promise anything. But as a plus, including me here, if someone want to learn haskell things like this can be a good cause and a good motivation to do it with joy ...

[BlueJayofEvil]

I just emerged Himerge today (though getting the GHC-6.6 took a few hours) and it seems really good. The lack of tooltips is a minus for this nice GUI, but it's still nice. I can definitely see this GUI going places...