New repository configuration ponderings

[Gary L. Greene, Jr.]

On Friday 17 November 2006 08:24, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> 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)

May be brittle, but I am willing to deal with it. In a best-case-scenario, the 
whole apt suite would have a machine readable output mode, so scripts can 
easily parse out the data that they need.

> 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.

If the Perl bindings to apt are half way reasonable, I guess I could work with 
them, but really I was already looking at apt-shell for most of the work, 
since the majority of the time while the UI is up, the user isn't doing 
anything other than selecting packages thus keeping it in a waiting state. 
Also the actual transaction has already been GUI-fied by Logan Rathbone, of 
the PhoeNUX OS project, with kapt-get. The only thing left to do is get an 
ncurses UI for it made, as it currently only has a Qt UI.

> > 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 :)

What about SVK? IIRC, it's supposed to be built off SVN but allows for 
distributed SC.

> > 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 :)

Very much agreed.

>  	- Panu -
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> apt-rpm at lists.laiskiainen.org
> http://lists.laiskiainen.org/listinfo.cgi/apt-rpm-laiskiainen.org

-- 
Gary L. Greene, Jr.
Sent from: uriel.tolharadys.net
 09:07:48 up 1 day, 23:06,  5 users,  load average: 0.06, 0.09, 0.03
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