There was some talk amidst the LSB discussion a while back about how
daunting Debian's packaging system can be to the new user, with basic
functionality spread across several different programs. The idea was
proposed to write a program that created a simpler interface to all the
rest, someone mentioned it was already done (but not packages), and that
was the last I saw of it on this list.
I had a program I wrote myself to automatically query the information in
a package, that automatically detected whether it should use apt-cache show
or dpkg -I. After a bit of thought, I extended it and came up with a
program I called 'Feta', or Front End To APT.
Feta currently provides a one-program interface to a lot of dpkg-repack,
dpkg, apt-get, apt-cache, and dpkg-reconfigure. It also implements an
idea I don't remember hearing about here, a "teaching" mode (set by -t)
that displays the commands that it's running in the background.
Feta is available for download at
http://www.sacredchao.net/software/feta-0.0.0.tar.gz
and a signature (which should match the one on this email) at
http://www.sacredchao.net/software/feta-0.0.0.tar.gz.sig
It's not done yet. Functions I commonly use not implemented yet are:
- searching for a file in a package
- listing files in a package
- searching a package description
- building and installing source packages
Also, it's implemented in Perl. Depending on your point of view, this is
either good or bad.
I have three questions about it:
1. Is this something that Debian is interested in packaging and providing?
2. If so, would a name change to 'apt' or something more obvious to users
be in order?
3. Also if so, what other functionality would you like to see added? I
think it would be best to avoid have too many commands, since many
parts of dpkg/apt aren't user-oriented (e.g. -fsys-tarfile) or might
cause problems when a frontend is used (e.g. --force).
Thanks.
--
- Joe "piman" Wreschnig <piman@sacredchao.net> - http://www.sacredchao.net
"What I did was justified because I had a policy of my own... It's okay
to be different, to not conform to society."
-- Chen Kenichi, Iron Chef Chinese
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