[GSoC] Pybombs and more - Weekly Update
In the last week, I have worked on two things - main one being Pybombs GUI and a bit on addressing the pybombs' support for airgapped systems. Read along to know the updates on pybombs-qtgui and the idea for this pybombs issue
Pybombs - final touches
Like I mentioned in my last week's update, I have added a dialog to collect the logs generated by pybombs-qtgui and the pybombs-cli running as the backend. Another problem I worked on is to deal with the mutliprocess functionality introduced in pybombs-gui to make the user experience smooth while browsing the apps on app-store. Earlier, I had pushed a part of the GUI stuff to a non-main thread and that created few issues while running the app - newbie mistakes ! It took some good amount of time to figure out the problem and fix it. The app now works smooth (no warnings or Qt complaints from the non-main thread).
Another problem I faced(wroked on) this week is the use of pkexec with pybombs app store. If pybombs were just a GUI for one package manager, a single policy file will do the trick. But pybombs is a wrapper around the multiple package managers that are native to the operating system, example: pip, pacman, dnf/yum etc.,
Here's the tricky part, even when we add a policy file to each of the package managers native to the distro, pybombs may call a native package manager and pip to build a system wide package and a pypi package consequetively. Due to pkexec's nice security feature, user is prompted with a authentication agent a lot of times depending on the package managers invoked. I am currently working on this and this is the only issue to be addressed before releasing the app store.
GNU Radio OOT Module mirror repos
What happens when you host a GNU Radio hackathon, where you are supposed to provide GNU Radio and the OOT Modules but have limited internet access ? That's just one simple scenario where an end user has little or no access to internet.
One solution is to maintain a mirror of GNU Radio and all the OOT Modules on a central location and which can be easily accessible by the airgapped systems as well. Gitlab has a nice feature of hosting mirror repositories and updates the repo once in an hour. The idea is similar to maintaining vim scripts mirror repo where a user can clone the complete set of modules with a single command or select those repos which will fit the need. This idea also addresses the archiving problem for current CGRAN website. The CGRAN site can update the information available from the mirror repos.
Similar projects that I have come across in similar lines are GDG Suzhou's android-repository, vim scripts and a recent activity on GNU Radio mailing list. I will update more on this idea in next week's progress report. That's the update for now, Pip pip ! If you followed this post till here, enjoy this random xkcd comic strip !