After two weeks of testing and bugfixing for 0.92.4, it’s time to release 0.92.4 Beta!

• Bugfixes
  • #522433 – Irritating “Can’t load image from file… install.png” message
  • #522436 – No longer requires a primary sources.list to open a project
  • #522440 – Prevented translations from loading
• Updated translations

There are still a few known bugs that need fixing…

• #522529 – On some systems, parts of the interface do not display correctly
• #526259 – Will not run on Windows on some machines
• #510642 – Binary will not run correctly when executed from a tree-style file browser

So head to the Test Keryx 0.92.4 page and check it out!

If you run into any trouble please report it on Launchpad or on the Forums.

Well, I’m proud to announce that we have broken 10,000 downloads! On Launchpad.net, we have listed under 10k downloads, but this is only recording the downloads after we migrated to releasing on Launchpad. There was over 1,500 downloads recorded before the move, so we are safely in the clear for breaking 10,000! I just wanted to share my and the rest of the development team gratitude for all your support and feedback!

We are trying our best to get working on version 1.0 and are incorporating all the wonderful ideas you have brought to us. Hopefully things will start shaping up quickly and have a much more streamlined version of Keryx on the way that is much easier to use!

There are quite a few improvements in this release, but these are a couple of the big ones…

• Simplified package installation
  Keryx has always done a great job of downloading packages and dependencies, but installing them has been a different story. No more! Keryx now features a GUI dialog for installing downloaded packages.
• Linux binary
  Ever tried to run the Keryx GUI on a Linux machine? It used to require force-installing circular dependencies with the command line. Well, now running Keryx GUI on Linux is as simple as double-clicking the icon in your file browser!

There have also been a couple of bugfixes…

• #510637 – A problem with project creation on certain machines has been fixed.
• #503056 – Now warns when a compatible version of wxPython is not available.

Enough talk. Download 0.92.4, give it a try, and let us know how it goes!

If you run into any trouble please report it on Launchpad or on the Forums.

Some users have encountered the following error while trying to run Keryx on Linux.

ImportError: No module named delayedresult

This error is a result of using an older version of WxPython. The solution is to remove the older WxPython libraries and install the newer ones. In Ubuntu that is accomplished with this command:

sudo apt-get remove libwxbase2.6-0 libwxgtk2.6-0 python-wxgtk2.6 && sudo apt-get install libwxbase2.8-0 libwxgtk2.8-0 python-wxgtk2.8

Keryx 0.92.3.1 was released this morning, complete with new translations and default projects for Ubuntu Hardy and Karmic.

Although a few bugs have been reported, they all appear minor and existed before the 0.92.3.1 changes. They can be fixed in a future release.

Drop by the Download page and get it while it’s hot!

While working on 0.92.4, some quick improvements have been made that can be released by right away. Among them are…

• Bundled Arabic, Czech, Canadian English, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Malayalam, Norwegian Bokmål, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Sinhala, Swedish, and Thai translations. A big thanks to the translators!
  Addition of Karmic and Hardy LTS default projects.

Assuming no major bugs are discovered in the next week, 0.92.3.1 will be released Saturday the 12th of this month. If you encounter any issues, please report them on the forums.

Head on over to the 0.92.3.1 download page to get started.

Happy testing!

UPDATE: 0.92.3.1 has been officially released and is available on our download page.

Work on Package Installation

Tuesday night, we discussed how Keryx should install packages. Although the development team would like Keryx to install packages without the user ever having to see the command line, we finally decided that that would be impractical to attempt  before 1.0. Instead, apt-get (or aptitude) will be called inside an xterm so the user can read and diagnose any errors. This will make package installation much easier to implement and get Keryx 0.92.4 out sooner.

What Still Needs to be Worked on for 0.92.4?

The development team still needs to

• implement package installation
• improve download dialogs
• build a Linux binary
• build a Portable App

Working toward 0.92.4

New Possible Feature: Package Installation

Tuesday night, jacseen proposed including another feature in 0.92.4: package installation. This is a feature that has been planned for 1.0, but not considered for 0.92.x. However, with the release date of 1.0 well in the future, jacseen believes it worthwhile to implement package installation in a quick-and-dirty fashion before then.

One interesting issue that was raised is that software installation will require root privileges. It was determined that Keryx will attempt to run the installer using gksu or kdesu. If both of those fail, Keryx will complain about needing root privileges and abort installation. The user would then need to run Keryx as root (presumably using sudo) so the installation process would inherit the root privileges.

Old News: New Default Projects

Another plan for 0.92.4 is to include 9.10 and 8.04 default projects.

A quick explanation of “default projects”: A default project is created by taking the list of installed packages (status file) from several Ubuntu flavors and narrowing them down to one list containing only the software included in all of them. This ensures that, no matter which of the several flavors the user runs, Keryx will download all necessary dependencies, even if it means getting a few unnecessary ones.

In Keryx 0.92.4, we will include four new default projects — 9.10 32-bit, 9.10 64-bit, 8.04 32-bit, and 8.04 64-bit. To create these, we will need status files from both architectures and both releases (9.10 and 8.04) of each of the three major Ubuntu flavors (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu). That is a dozen status files. And because I have very limited downloading capability (my Internet is capped at 5GB/month), I will be asking folks to contribute status files from ISOs that they have downloaded or can download. Follow the steps I have posted on the forum to contribute a status file.

Once we have finished creating all the default projects and implementing quick-and-dirty package installation (should we decide to include it in this release), compiling Keryx for Linux will be the only step remaining before a grand 0.92.4 release!

With that goal in mind, I go back to coding. I’ll see you next Tuesday!

I neglected to post about last week’s meeting because not a whole lot happened. However, there was plenty to talk about this time around. So, without further ado…

Plans for a 0.92.4 Release

While 0.92.3 addressed many important problems, there were still a few small things that needed work.

Improved Options GUI

First among them was the somewhat confusing proxy options GUI. In 0.92.3, users are expected to provide a proxy URL without help text explaining what the URL should look like. Though more advanced users automatically know to provide “http://:”, many users do not. To adress this, 0.92.4 will provide the “http://” and “:”. Users will only have to fill in the blanks.

“Update Status” Button

The second improvement to be made is the addition of an “Update Status” button to the main GUI. If the user is on his local machine, this will update the list of installed packages so Keryx will know not to download any software that has been installed since project creation. One problem with this plan is that, unless users have installed the GUI dependencies, they will not be able to use the GUI on their local machine. This brings us to the third improvement…

Linux Binary

0.92.4 will include a Linux binary in addition to the Windows executable. This will eliminate the annoying process of installing the wxWidgets packages on Linux machines to enable use of the GUI.

Karmic and LTS “Default” Projects

Lastly, with the release of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) yesterday, it will not be long before the Jaunty default projects are outdated. In addition to Karmic default projects, 0.92.4 will include default projects for the most recent LTS release (currently 8.04).

With that, I am off to implement the new changes. I’ll see you at next meeting!

Chris has asked me to prepare blog posts after each weekly development meeting summarizing the decisions and conclusions made.

During last night’s meeting (10-13-09) I wanted to discuss a few improvements to the command line interface for 1.0. We also got to several other topics along the way.

First, we decided to remove the ‘create’ command from the interactive CLI. Instead, Keryx will check if the project exists when started. If not, Keryx will ask the user for confirmation, then create the project. After creation, some basic information about the project will be displayed (architecture, computer name, etc.) before going to the interactive prompt. If the project does exist, it will be loaded then go to the interactive prompt.

Another decision we arrived at was to group all of Keryx’s special download functions (download upgrades, dist-upgrades) into the ‘download’ command as arguments (ex. –upgrade, –dist-upgrade). The apt-get-like commands such as install, upgrade, and dist-upgrade will be for installing software on the local machine.
There was plenty of debate about this design. Jacseen suggested having commands such as ‘install’, ‘upgrade’, etc. automatically detect whether it is on the local or remote machine and thus whether to download or install packages. Though this would simplify the CLI considerably, it would take some control from the user, and could possibly lead to some confusion. We agreed to go with explicit download/install design for now, though we may look at Jacseen’s approach again later.

I also mentioned that we should add a ‘clear’ command to the CLI to purge project data. ‘keryx clear’ would clear all project data from the database, and ‘keryx clear <project_name>’ would only purge the data for one project.

Finally, we decided to store configuration options in the database to be edited via the CLI, while allowing for an optional text configuration file to override settings in the database.

Despite the intense debate and decision-making, we had a good time. Most importantly, we got a little better idea of what 1.0 will look like and moved one step closer to our goal of a great release.

Thanks to Chris and Jacseen for attending, and I look forward to next Tuesday!