Re: Unmaintained Packages (fwd)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 17:43:55 -0500 (CDT)
From: Adam Heath <doogie@debian.org>
To: <debian-devel@lists.debian.org>
Cc: <debian-devel@lists.debian.org>, <debian-dpkg@bugs.debian.org>
Subject: Re: Unmaintained Packages
Resent-Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 17:44:32 -0500 (CDT)
Resent-From: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
On Tue, 12 Aug 2003, Adam Heath wrote:
> pps: Watch debian-dpkg@lists this weekend, as I'll be summarizing my plans and
> status there.
Well, I decided not to wait, and announce the current list of planned features
for the new dpkg.
Major planned new features:
* statoverride support in dpkg-deb -b(while building a deb, the
perms/ownership can be changed).
* incremental deb creation(multiple data.tar.gz in the ar file)
* automatic file checksum generation while unpacking(or building)(the former
will be configurable, as it adds quite a bit of cpu overhead).
* bz2 and uncompressed support in debs(already in HEAD).
* dpkg-deb will no longer fork find nor tar for building, nor tar for
extracting. dpkg already uses an internal tar for extracting, so this is
not a big leap for dpkg-deb -x.
* exclude support while extracting(this could be used to keep from extracting
documentation or examples). Exclude files will be noted as such in the file
database, however.
* nlist format for the file database. This format will include full stat
info, which will be useful for system integrity checkers. Note, that HEAD
already has writing code for this.
* new source format, with support for multiple tars, multiple diffs, and
alternative compression formats. Colin Walters has submitted a rewritten
dpkg-source in python. However, none of the dpkg developers have looked at
it yet.)
* several new additional tools, that export internal libdpkg functions:
dpkg-tar, dpkg-ar, dpkg-compressor(gzip, bzip2, cat), dpkg-compare-version,
dpkg-find.
* it's planned to rewrite most of the scripted tools in dpkg in c(this does
not include dpkg-dev). There's currently a c version of update-alternatives
in rpm, which we plan on making use of.
* dpkg in 'daemon' mode, to be used by apt, as a remote control function.(this
actually has existed since dpkg since 1.9.0, but was never mentioned in
debian/changelog, because it was disabled, due to it not being quite what
apt needs. There's also a --status-fd, which currently does work, however.)
* some sort of arch flavor support. The exact nature of this support is not
quite known yet. As part of this support, debian/control will support
fields with 'alternates'. Read the lib-64 thread on -dpkg for more info.
* logging(at least of installation status changes, probably not maint script
logging, at least not by capturing stdin/stderr)
* test cases for source-level functions, and binary programs.
Major bugs to fix:
* file replaces on conffiles
* removal ordering, to match installation ordering(this just means that maint
scripts will be called in the same order as when they are called during an
install)
Some of these features will be easier to implement with the new code, then if
the old code was kept around. Also, the old code doesn't make it as simple as
it could be for doing test cases.
These lists are also not inclusive.
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