What’s cooking in Muon trunk

Happy 10/10/10, everybody!

I’d like to take this opportunity to show off some of the neat things cooking in trunk for Muon. All these features will land with Muon 1.1, for which I have not yet set a release date yet. I’ll start off with some of the smaller features for the main Muon user interface.

Enhancements

• Several new status filters have been added to the filter sidebar, including “Residual Config” for de-installed packages that can be purged of lingering system config files, and an “Installed (auto-removable)” filter. The latter shows packages that were automatically installed as dependencies, where the package that depended on them is no longer installed. (Basically, apt-get autoremove)
• An action has been added to the edit menu to mark all auto-removeable packages for removal.

• A progress bar for search index rebuilds has been added to the status bar.
• The origin of a package has been added to the Technical Details tab.
• The contents of the “Installed Files” tab are now sorted alphabetically.
• You can now sort the package view by status and requested status.
• Canonical-supported packages now have a Kubuntu or Ubuntu emblem on their entry in the package view. (Depending on if you’re running Kubuntu or Ubuntu). (Visible in the above screenshot)

Here are some of the bigger features:

Revamped download view

The download view has been given a lot of love this cycle. A joint-effort between Guillaume and myself, (Guillaume did most of the work) the download view now reports progress for each item individually. Furthermore, it now also shows the size of each package in its own column. The screenshot really speaks for itself, though.

The Muon Updater

Another big development for 1.1 is the new Muon Updater. The name is pretty self-explanatory, but in essence it is an update-centric GUI built off of Muon parts. No filters, search or extra fluff. It also automatically marks all upgradeable packages for upgrade, as a good updater should.

Actually, it still does have a bit of extra fluff. I plan to replace the current tab widget currently stolen from Muon with something better. Less tabs, with more of a focus on updating. This will require some improvements in changelog parsing in QApt, though, so for now clicking on a package will show you the same set of tabs as they would in Muon.

The Muon Notifier

What good is an updater, if you don’t have a way to be told of updates? Based heavily off of the Kubuntu Notification Helper, the Muon Notifier notifies of both regular updates as well as distribution upgrades to the next version of Kubuntu. (The latter only if on a Kubuntu system.)

I have made some enhancements to Kubuntu Notification Helper that will land in Kubuntu 11.04 which I have also ported over to Muon Notifier. Namely, K-N-H and Muon Notifier can now either notify you will only tray icons, only notifications, or a mixture of both. When using only KDE notifications, the notifications will have actions in the notification and will be persistent. When used in combo with the tray icon, the notification will be transient and will not have actions in the notification, since clicking on the tray icon will run the action. (With the context menu exposing the hide/ignore permanently actions) By default, the KNotify/tray icon setting will be selected. I still have to make a GUI for configuring this for Muon, but this is how I have extended the existing Kubuntu Notification Helper config dialog to accommodate the new settings:

(And yes, I am aware that “Disable X” should be changed to “X only” to conform with the HIG. ;-))

TODO

Still on the todo list is:

• Make the Muon configuration dialog, for both notification options and some APT system options, along with other miscellaneous things like how many actions undo/redo will save.
• Tailor Muon Updater more towards updating with better/focused package tabs.
• History viewer
• “Slow” search as a supplemental alternative Xapian quick search
• Muon Installer. (Might be 1.2 material)