New repository configuration ponderings

[Panu Matilainen]

On Sat, 11 Nov 2006, Gary L. Greene, Jr. wrote:
>
> More looking through my backlog of messages....
>
> If people are interested in helping me work on PXI (a PerlQt GUI package
> manager that uses the apt command instead of doing things via libapt) we can

Mm, calling external apt cli through a frontend is
a) slow (because you needlessly rebuild the dependency cache for any given 
command, been there...)
b) brittle (tends to break any time something changes in the output 
format)

I'd rather see the bindings to various languages improved than a frontend 
based on screen-scraping. OTOH, I suppose you could pipe up with apt-shell 
to fix a) and for b) we could maybe have an "output mode" inteded for 
machine consumption. AltLinux has a "simple output" patch for something 
like that, but it only covers apt-get itself, not shell or cache.

> eventually ask folks to move to this new PM GUI instead of supporting
> Snaptic, especially since the sources for Synaptic are now under a bzr tree
> in the Ubuntu project's servers. This way it'll all be under SVN and we can

FWIW I've been playing around with git lately, and while I haven't decided 
anything yet it's more than just possible I'll switch from SVN to git (or 
some other distributed SCM) in not too distant future. So "all under SVN" 
might not hold too long. In case you wonder why about the reasons, it 
mostly has to do with offline capabilities and I think that a distributed 
SCM would fit the development model (or lack of thereof ;) better than the 
central SVN repo. Not to mention that at least git is so ridiculously fast 
it makes me weep now to browse history with svn log / diff :)

> be as apt-rpm specific as we want. Also I'd be more than willing to have PXI
> have a ncurses mode too, which would allow editing the sources.list (or
> sources.conf when the new support goes in....), and would generally allow
> things like aptitude's CLI based management.

A sane ncurses-mode frontend would certainly be nice (read: I can't really 
get along with aptitude :)

 	- Panu -