HaikuDépôt

HaikuDepot is the central application when it comes to managing your software packages. With it you can browse and search through package repositories and install, update and uninstall packages. By default, HaikuDepot starts up with a list of "Featured packages", software that's deemed interesting to many users.

As soon as you enter something in the Search terms box, the display changes to smaller icons and more information arranged in columns.

Le filtre

Au dessus de la liste des paquets, on trouve des critères pour filtrer ceux visibles :

• Le menu déroulant Category (catégorie) permet de limiter la liste à une catégorie, comme « Audio » ou « Jeux ».

• The Repositories pop-up menu determines which online repos are queried or if only those packages are shown, that were installed from somewhere other than an online repo ("Local"). Maybe from an USB thumb drive or downloaded from some website or a package that you've built yourself.

• Le champs de texte Search terms permet de filtrer la liste aux paquets qui contiennent tout les chaînes saisies (séparée par des espaces) soit dans leur nom soit dans leur description.

La liste

Comme dans une fenêtre du Tracker, il est possible de choisir quels colonnes afficher avec un clic droit sur l’entête de la colonne. Un clic gauche trie la liste en fonction de la colonne. Bien sûr, il est possible de réorganiser les colonnes en les glissant vers une nouvelle position.

La colonne de statut d’un paquet peut avoir pour valeur :

• Active: le paquet est déjà installé et prêt à être utilisé.

• Available: The package exists in that repository and can be downloaded and installed. If there are any dependencies on other packages, you'll be informed of that while installing and get the choice of downloading/installing all that's necessary.

• Pending / %: Pending is shown for a package that is queued for download/installation. While a package is downloaded, the progress is shown as percentage.

• Update available: une version plus récente que celle déjà installée est disponible.

Vous pouvez attraper la ligne en pointillé entre la liste des paquets et la zone d’information pour redimensionner verticalement la liste des paquets.

La zone d'information

At the bottom is an area that displays information on the package that is currently selected in the list above it.
To the right of package name, author, rating and version is a button, that – depending on the current state of the package – lets you Install, Uninstall or Update it. If a package is already installed, you'll find an additional button there to Open the application.

Below are four tabs: About, Ratings, Changelog and Contents.

• À propos

  Le premier onglet comporte une description détaillée du paquet, accompagné d'une copie d'écran, une adresse de contact et l'URL de l'équipe qui maintient ce paquet logiciel, quand l'information est disponible. En cliquant sur la copie d'écran, la vignette s'ouvrira en taille réelle dans une nouvelle fenêtre

• Ratings

  The second tab shows ratings and comments of users, if available.

  

  To the left is a statistic, showing the number of stars (1 to 5) the package got from how many users.
  In the middle are user comments with their nickname, the number of stars they gave the package and which version of the package they were rating or commenting on. You'll find more on how to rate a package yourself further down.
  

• Changelog

  Here you find a detailed history of all the versions of the package that have been released so far, if the maintainer of the package provides that information.

• Contents

  The last tab shows all the files and folders a package contains. This only works for already downloaded packages.

Tools and Show

In the Tools menu at the top of the window, you'll find an item to Refresh repositories. This will request an up-to-date list of all available packages from the repositories. The other item is to Manage repositories.... It opens the Repositories preferences, to add/remove or disable and enable repositories.

Under Show you can deactivate Only featured packages. Now you'll always see all packages and not just the featured ones when HaikuDepot starts up or the search text field is empty.
Furthermore, you can choose to also Show Develop packages and Source packages in the packages list. For the normal user those are of no interest and would only clutter the list. They are important, however, for people who need the libraries, headers etc. of a package to develop and compile programs depending on them.

Of more interest are the options to only show Available packages and Installed packages, which are pretty self-explanatory.

Créer un compte utilisateur

To be able to rate a package, you need a user account at the Haiku Depot Server that serves all the packages and keeps track of ratings and user comments. You can create an account within the HaikuDepot application by clicking on the menu in the far right of the menu bar that shows your current status: Not logged in. Choosing Log in... opens a window with two tabs; one to enter your user name and password (once you have those) to log in, and the other to create a new account:

To create an account you need to:

• use an all lower-case user name without special characters
• use a password that's at least 8 characters long with at least 2 capitals and 2 numbers
• provide a valid email address (if you want a new password sent to you in case you forgot it)
• solve the captcha

After logging in, the top-right menu of the HaikuDepot window will now say Logged in as (...), showing your user name. The menu now offers you to Switch account... or Log out.

Noter et Commenter

After you've created a user account and are logged in, you can rate a package and leave a comment, if you want. Just hover the mouse over the rating stars in the info area of a package and they turn into a Rating... button. Click it to open the rating window:

Here you move the mouse over the stars to light them up and choose your rating, you can also choose from a number of levels to judge the stability of the application and pick the language of your optional comment. To make a comment meaningful, you should have worked with the application you're about to rate for a while to become familiar with its features, bugs and quirks. And don't write the next great American novel... keep it short, sweet and polite. :)
After you click Send the data is transmitted to the server. You may have to go to the Tools menu to Refresh repositories before you can see your changes.

At any time, you can come back and edit your comment and re-rate it. You can also hide your rating from other users by deactivating the checkbox Other users can see this rating.