Re: Package splitting and upgrades
On Sun, 2002-03-03 at 16:02, Joe Wreschnig wrote:
> This, IMO, is the crux of the problem for which the current state of
> Feta is merely a symptom (and the packaging of Feta will be a
> nonsolution, if nice). APT has a nicely (at least from an external
> viewpoint) designed multiple repository system. There is a nice list of
> available APT sources. Why is there not a program to
> a) Read a list of APT sources (deb and deb-src).
> b) Read the packages/versions/fields in them.
> c) Add and remove lines to /etc/sources.list in a friendly manner using
> this information.
Interesting.
A while back, I came up with a system to handle sources.list that I
called "RepoMan" (you might be able to find mention of it in the d-devel
list archives). It used sets of XML files to list apt sources, and
provided a GUI for the user to add and remove repositories.
The last version I worked on worked, but had a butt-ugly GUI and was a
little flaky. I tried to get it into Progeny Debian, but we didn't have
time for it there either. Since then, other things have taken up my
time.
Some of its features:
- Nice descriptive strings (i.e. "Ximian GNOME Repository" instead of
"ximian")
- Automatic mirror handling. The XML files were expected to contain
mirror lists by country; RepoMan would ask for your country code, and
pick the best mirror from each list.
- Cascading data files; you could get a master directory of
repositories, then consult each repository for its mirrors. On the TODO
list was a feature where directories could refer to other directories,
and where each repo could provide updated directory info for itself in
case the directory got out of sync.
I was thinking of reviving it, adding pin support, and doing a few other
things, but it might do just as well as a feta plugin - especially if
feta will provide something resembling a decent non-command-line UI.
What do you think?
/me should go check out feta sometime...
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