Re: ANNOUNCE: python-apt

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@brown.edu>]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2000 at 08:39:43AM -0500, Daniel Burrows was heard to say:
>   Another thing I'm wondering about is the iterators -- right now I've wrapped
> them pretty straightforwardly, substituting a 'next' member for the increment
> operation.  I could make them into sequences (as you suggested with the
> version list), but this has the drawback that accessing an arbitrary member
> in Python would be O(n) and iterating over the list in a 'for' loop would
> be O(n^2) (normal Python sequences are just arrays, so it's expected that
> those operations will be O(1) and O(n))  OTOH, "for i in package.versions" is
> a pretty nice way to do things.
> 
>   Maybe I should provide that interface and put a warning on it that it's not
> efficient for long lists, so (eg) iterating over the entire package cache like
> that is a bad idea..

  Ok, I think I worked out how to do this.  A fairly standard idiom in Python
is that dictionary-like objects provide a 'keys' method which lists all the
keys of the object, and a 'values' method which lists the values.  I'll provide
these for the package class, where the 'keys' are the package names and the
'values' are the package iterators.  Other iterator lists can probably be
exposed as sequences; version lists (for example) are short enough that the
efficiency hit won't matter.  (..what about the reverse depends list for
libc6?)  In all cases, I think I'll keep the 'next' member around for people who
want to use it.

  Daniel

-- 
Exhilaration is that feeling you get just after a great idea hits you,
and just before you realize what is wrong with it.