Re: RFH: APT

[Adam Heath <doogie@debian.org>]

I am willing to manage releases, builds, and uploads.  Even doing
documentation tweaks, etc.  However, I am not familiar enough with the
nitty-gritty details of the dependency resolving api, so would not be able to
do work in that area.

I also already have cvs write access(having done some earlier versions of the
ftp client, and some build system tweaks, I mainly just lurk now), so doing
the above would fit right into my 'expertise', as it were.

On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:

>
> [Please always CC me on list postings]
>
> Hi Everybody,
>
> It seems I no longer have time to make forward progress on the APT bug
> list - essentially bugs are being filed faster than I can deal with them -
> which is to say I don't have all that much time, not that there are so
> many bugs :> Most of the interesting bugs have been eliminated years ago,
> substantial parts of the codebase have been largely unchanged for the
> better part of 4 years.

This is sad.  I'm sorry you haven't had time.

> But there are still a number of odd corner cases that people find, and of
> course spelling errors in the man pages, plus a couple of larger issues.

Do you have time to give more detail about these cases?  Does apt have a test
suite, of any style/kind?

> Many things have been delt with in the CVS version, some 55 seperate bug
> reports have been addressed, including some of the fairly large items a
> few people have been wanting. However, there hasn't been a new release in
> over a year.

Is it possible that some bugs have been fixed in cvs, but not noted in the
changelog, and not noted in the bts?

> But, I also know this version has at least 1, and perhaps 2, real show
> stopper problems - that is to say for 90% of the population it is a
> disimprovement to the venerable 0.5.4 version everyone uses now.

Do you have more information about these problems?  Do you have a way to
duplicate them?

> Since APT is such a widely used package I absolutely don't want to inflict
> this on the project without having some way to deal with any problems in a
> timely manner. Thus the request for help..

Well, if someone were available to respond to bug reports, in a timely matter,
and upload to experimental may be worthwhile.  As I said above, I'm willing to
be a bug leutinant(copying the kernel definition), for apt.

> I think I would find two things fairly usefull:
>
> Circulate some debs for the CVS version and determine how buggy it
> actually is. This will probably require actually going and making the
> packaging scripts conform to the latest policy, I'm sure somethings have
> changed since this was last done.

Again, I'm willing to do this.

> Try to do something with the BTS. There are alot of bugs filed, and lots
> of them have very poor information. Some are actually quite trivial I
> think, it just takes some effort to construct the situation that is
> described.

Anyone else want to help here?

> Beyond that it would be cool if someone was interested enough in some of
> the smaller/large features people want to actually try and implement
> them..

I see some required features that dpkg has implemented that are not part of
the current changelog(pre versions being a big one).  It'd probably be easy
to fix apt's version parser(copy the one from dpkg would be the simplist
case).

Also, with the upcoming dpkg 2.0, and the new .deb format(3.0), some work
needs to be done in that part of apt.

I can do the former in apt easy enough, and as I implement and finish up the
latter in dpkg, I can also do it in apt.