Re: apt-show-versions rewrite
On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 08:28:14AM -0400, nick black wrote:
> (CC'd kinda widely, eh; feel free to trim responses)
>
> Hello there, Christoph!
>
> I've used apt-show-versions for years, and found it quite useful. It's a bit
> slow, though, and its need to update a root-owned disk cache is kind of
> unfortunate.
>
> As part of my RAPTORIAL project (https://github.com/dankamongmen/raptorial),
> I've implemented "rapt-show-versions", an apt-show-versions clone making use
> of my libraptorial library. This multithreaded C engine ends up being quite
> a bit faster than apt-show-versions; a single core run comes in around .21s
> whereas apt-show-versions takes about 1.01s, while allowing it to use all 4
> hyperthreaded cores drops this to .04s. We will soon begin shipping
> RAPTORIAL tools in SprezzOS.
>
> I'm aiming for feature-equivalence with apt-show-versions (the -i option
> becomes a no-op, since I don't use a cache), though I'm not yet there. Core
> functionality is present, and debugged. The code is, so far as I know,
> portable across POSIX systems.
>
> I'd like to show deference to you, as the author of apt-show-versions. How
> would you like to proceed on this? I figure there's three options:
>
> - The apt-show-versions package begins building my code, which I will
> version relative to current apt-show-versions, on which there would be no
> further development.
>
> - A new package, rapt-show-versions, is introduced, probably with
> alternatives and Provides support.
>
> - The code is not introduced into Debian anytime soon.
>
> Know that I am not (yet) a DD, though I'm happy to ITP this up if someone
> will help it through.
>
> Please take a look, and let me know how you'd like to move forward.
>
> Note that I don't by any means propose replacing other APT components
> with RAPTORIAL, yet.
>
Proposing to replace something with code that is not (yet) available
is not really helpful. The code you have linked to above seems to be
a rather limited parser that can extract some parts from packages
files (namely, names and versions). It is in no way a replacement
for apt-show-versions, at least not for now.
We could probably easily rewrite apt-show-versions in C++ using
libapt-pkg and get an immensive speed up this way, as we'd be
able to utilise APT's cache (the cache should have all required
information in it anyway).
--
Julian Andres Klode - Debian Developer, Ubuntu Member
See http://wiki.debian.org/JulianAndresKlode and http://jak-linux.org/.
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