About

HaikuDepot (the name may still change) is hoped to become the GUI package manager for Haiku. You may compare this with the Ubuntu Software Center, or similar front ends to software repositories.

The main purpose of HaikuDepot will be to let the user

• manage repositories (TODO: link within wiki)
• list and search available packages (by filtering the list by categories and/or search terms)
• pull in additional information about a package on top of what is provided by the Package Kit and the actual packages itself.

The additional information shall be nicely represented and layouted. It consists of

• screen shots if applicable
• user ratings
• translated package information such as description and changelog

The additional information will be pulled from a web application (does not yet exist) most likely hosted by the project (has not been discussed yet). The web application would allow users to input and upload information about packages. Some information will be uploaded by HaikuDepot itself, such as when a user creates or edits her rating and review/comment for a given package version.

Status of development

HaikuDepot currently displays dummy package data. It is mostly ready for the merge of the PM git branch. Once that is done, the initial list of packages will be retrieved via the new Package Kit APIs. The API will also be used to obtain information about a package's status and the available actions that can be performed on it. And of course those actions need to be triggered. Another area of work will be presenting progress information for tasks that (may) take a bit longer, and appropriate error reporting and resolving.