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XIPM v0.4

What is it?

XIPM (X Interface for Package Management) is a graphical user interface built with gtk. The aim was to do an effecient and easy to use package management tool. It also includes packaging functions.

How to install it?

read the file 'INSTALL'

How does it works?

XIPM was developped so that its usage would be entierly intuitive and as easy to use for the user than for the packager.

Nontherless, some more details:

*About the interface

It is made up of three windows.
In the first one on the left, you can navigate throught groups and launch searches. In the second one, you can select a file. And in the third one, you can see informations about currently selected file

The first window acts as a filter: when you select a group, the second window shows only files of this group and its sub-groups. Advanced filters functions have been added to the group tree to ease package manipulation:

        "Find/by name"
        "Find/by filename"
        "Find/in descriptions"

Their usage seems to be clear.

The second window shows files filtered with the group tree in the first window. The icon facing each of the files is for now either an opened packet to say "this one is already installed" or closed to say "this one has not yet been installed".
If XIPM was unable to determine whether the packet was installed or not, the "not installed" flag is set.

The third window is a notebook made of three tabs: **Descriptions: displays currently selected packet description **Contents: displays a tree of the datas of the selected packet **Dependencies: displays what is needed so that the packet can be

successfully installed and used.

*About packs.desc

The first thing XIPM does when it is launched is to try loading the file "packs.desc". If it fails, you can launch commands with the menu. For the description of the desc file format, look at "DESC.SPEC"

An exportator of desc files has been implemented so that the packager can speed up the initialisation process of the interface: the function AddRPMFolder needs time to be executed and can be replaced by a serie of explicit packets descriptions that XIPM can write and that are loaded at least twice time faster.

*Command line parameters

To launch XIPM: 'XIPM [desc_file]'
where desc_file is the desc file to load instead of packs.desc.

What comes next?

More packaging features, conversion features, better management of more formats (tgz, deb, ...), more conviviality, and... what you want!! Simply leave me a mail at Soda@penguinpowered.com

(NB: Particularly for the years 1999-2000, I will need coworkers because I will

simply have NO TIME to develop it!)

Remark

I used the terms of 'package' and 'packet' in a slightly different manner the linux community is used to. In fact, in the spirit of XIPM, 'package' does not mean a simple archive but a compilation of archives, of rpms or whathever. And 'packet' points out the single archive.

Latest versions

They are available on the web trought http://multimania.com/xsodax/main.htm

How to contact the author

For comments or if you want to do any developpment on XIPM, or if you're simply interrested on how something was made, leave me a mail at Soda@penguinpowered.com

Francois de Laigue aka Soda