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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