Re: graphical apt, trials and tribulations

[Seth Nickell <snickell@stanford.edu>]

On Fri, 2002-05-24 at 01:13, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 07:45:19PM -0700, Seth Nickell wrote:
> > But right now I'm more interested in ideas people have about allowing
> > dpkg to be split into a libdpkg that gives feedback as it installs and a
> > dpkg command-line frontend (much as the split between libapt-pkg and
> > apt-get happens today). This is really critical to providing the user
> > with feedback during the install process. Right now we get nice feedback
> > as the packages are downloading and during setup to some extent, but
> > almost no feedback while the (potentially rather long) dpkg process
> > itself is occurring. I just say "Installing packages", but you really
> > should tell the user more for such a long operation.
> 
> Um. Can't you just popen() dpkg (or apt-get) and read from it as it's
> running, parsing the output to decide what's happening? Just because
> it's a separate process should have no bearing on whether you can get
> feedback, unless I'm missing something quite considerable ...

Yes. As I said, I can do some things with a horrible hack. Its probably
going to be fragile and unreliable, and I still can't give progress
during the install of the actual package because dpkg as called by
libapt-pkg (i.e. without the extra information "intended" to be
programmatically parsed) doesn't give incremental update information.

Such an "interface" would not pass API review in GNOME. I really don't
understand the point of making this a "command line interface" rather
than a real library API ??? Its just harder for everyone involved.

-Seth


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