Re: Working on dpkg during Debconf

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi,

On Wed, 2006-05-03 at 11:35:51 +0200, Frank Lichtenheld wrote:
> I will be there from Monday (May, 8th) and will probably able to invest
> up to 50% of my time in dpkg (the other half hopefully going to
> packages.d.o).

I'll not be there, but I plan to hack on it from home, and irc and
mail is always there. =)

> Code:
>  - Going through the pile of patches in the BTS, discuss, test and
>    hopefully apply them

Yes, I'd like to apply as much of them as possible, if they are
correct and useful. My next goal is to get down the 400 bug barrier.

>  - Maybe some more clean-up work in scripts/. I would like to discuss
>    some ideas about restructuring the code to make for easier use and
>    maintainance in the future

Related more or less to this, I'd like to talk about coding style, and
in output format. I've been normalizing the output format for the
programs but not for the scripts, and the coding style a bit on the
stuff I've modified.

>  - I have neglected the test-suite discussion I started myself lately.
>    Experiences like the dpkg-scanpackages patches have shown that we
>    really, really should have one

Agree.

> Other:
>  - Etch release plan. We have essentially 3 months left until the base
>    freeze, so we should make a list of bugs we would like to resolve
>    until then. Maybe we also can identify some bugs we will certainly
>    not fix for etch since they would mean too much changes.

I was thinking that we could use the TODO list file to more or less
coordinate some of the stuff (or a wiki page otherwise).

>  - Documentation. Especially for the dpkg-dev stuff I have the fealing
>    we change stuff way faster than we document these changes. Compiling
>    a list of added/changed features compared to the sarge version could
>    be a good idea.

I wanted to fill a NEWS file, but I'd like to revisit the short term
history since we started maintaing it and fill it from there. It could
serve as the basis for an announcment to d-d-a about new features
maybe.


I'll write more tomorrow about what are my plans... (now I'm too
tired).

regards,
guillem