Marius Mauch

I assume some of you have been wondering what has happened to my gentoo-stats project as there haven't been any news or updates recently. Well, unfortunately there isn't much going on, I guess I've been just a bit too frustrated with it to work on it in the last weeks/months. That frustration mainly comes from the package-filemap module and its crappy performance and the conceptual failure of the auth encryption I had planned/implemented. The latter is just frustrating simply due to the wasted time, but the former means the lack of a key feature, namely finding which packages provide a given file even for uninstalled packages. Already tried several things to get it faster but without real success so far
Now I have two more ideas how to get it still working: First is to simply reduce the amount of data to the bare minimum (e.g. just recording executables and libraries), the second is using a custom storage backend for filenames instead of using MySQL for everything (as the DBMS is the slow part). I really want to avoid the first (as it would reduce functionality and likely just delay the problem a bit) and only use it as a last resort before dropping the module completely, so a while ago I wrote a custom backend based for storing filenames efficiently, but haven't integrated it yet into the processing module. We'll see if I can find some time in the coming days/weeks to get this project back on track.

If you're interested in helping with it:
- I don't have any design for the web interface yet, so far it's just basic HTML-2.0 or so. I'm not a big designer, so this is something where I'd definitely welcome external help
- A GUI for the client would be nice (like for selecting data modules or performing complex queries), but I'm not a big fan of GUI programming (though I could help with any missing backend parts in the client)
- Wouldn't hurt to have someone else who's an expert with (My)SQL/mod_python/security have a look at the current code/db schema before this service goes into public testing.

So today I wrote a little script to store the ebuilds and associated files of installed packages into a separate overlay as a first measure to solve bug #126059. It's still far from perfect as it only adds to the overlay, isn't limited to ebuilds deleted by an `emerge --sync` (which can be seen as a benefit as well) and most importantly doesn't deal with Manifests yet.
The last point makes it rather useless for general usage, but it's just a prototype script to see if this is a viable solution to the problem of disappearing ebuilds.
So any feedback about this would be appreciated.