The Gwyple Installation and Usage Guide

1. Intro

Gwyple is written in Perl, and therefore I assume that it works without major problems on all operating systems. It has been tried on Linux (2.4), HP-UX (10.20) and SunOS (5.5).

Specific issues for the Windows OS are handled on a separate page.

Currently gwyple lacks an advanced installation method, so the installation requires some manual work.

2. Extracting the files

Gwyple comes as a *.tgz file, which is a short form for *.tar.gz, so you need GNU tar or something similar to unpack it. This creates a directory named gwyple-x.y.z that contains perl scripts and modules. Put this directory in your $PATH, or create a symbolic link to one of the directories in your path (something like "ln -s gwyple-x.y.z/gwyple.pl ~/bin/gwyple"). Whatever you prefer. That should be sufficient.

3. Prerequisites

a) The bug repository

Gwyple wants you to have a bug repository and it assumes that it is located in your home directory and is a directory named "mybugs". You should either create this directory or specify another one when starting up gwyple. To do the latter, you have to use the --dir argument. Examples: Whatever you prefer. I suggest to create ~/mybugs.

b) Perl version and needed modules

Gwyple features only standard perl constructs and should work with all recent perl versions. I use 5.005.03 and 5.6.x myself. Older versions than 5.005.03 will not be supported (unless the modification is really trivial).

The following perl modules are needed:

4. Gwyple Usage

4.1 The Gwyple Main Window

Gwyple's main window consists of six buttons (described below), a list box, a location line and a text box:
Note: This and all following screenshot are from Gwyple 1.3.0 (spring 2003). Newer versions may look differently.

In the top is a selection box, one bug report per line. Zero, one or more of these lines can be higlighted (selected). In the bottom is a text box that displays the full text of one bug report. This is the bug report that was most recently selected. Between the big boxes in the top and bottom is a small field that contains one line. This field is reserved for an URL for the selected bug. The user can use it for copy&paste: copy the line into the input buffer and just paste it into the browser. A very neat feature that was originally suggested by Thorsten Kolb.

4.2 The Rescan menu

The Rescan menu allows you to refresh the information gwyple has:

4.3 The Format menu

The format menu is quite complex and is therefore described in every detail on a separate page.

4.4 The Add menu

Here you can enter MRs to be added.
Information about requested MRs is fetched from the bug database, and put into a file in the current directory.

Enter MR numbers into the text field, separated by blanks or commas.

4.5 The Move/Delete/Export menu

Here you can move MRs into another directory, delete them or "export" them:
"export" will export the contents of selected lines in the list box to some location which is called the export destination. This can be some file or STDOUT, and it may even piped into some helper application. Please refer to the Format Menu Page for details about how to set the export destinations and some examples how to use them.

Backends may provide custom functions that are inserted into this menu. Currently only the DDTP backend uses this mechanism. The Template backend (Template.pm) has some example code for documentation purposes.

4.6 The Chdir menu

Here you can switch directories, and enter a different directory below the original start directory:

4.7 The Exit button

The exit button, well, exits gwyple.

Last modified: Sun Apr 27 12:52:07 MEST 2003