graphical apt, trials and tribulations
Hi, I've been with writing a GNOME frontend to libapt-pkg
(ApplicationManager in GNOME cvs, though its shaky at the moment because
I just ported it to GNOME2). The basic APIs for libapt-pkg are rather
convoluted, but that's managable. However, probably because most people
are using apt-get rather than a graphical apt, certain problems have
cropped up that make a graphical apt more or less infeasible (certainely
inconvenient).
1) A number of packages prompt for user input directly during
configuration. This basically precludes use of a nice interface. Popping
up a terminal box is not a serious solution. Things that use debconf
work just fine of course. It would be nice to have policy that
stipulated that direct prompting could not be done.
2) No feedback during the actual install process... Because although
apt-pkg is library-afied, dpkg is not. It seems like dpkg should be
split into libdpkg and a commandline frontend "dpkg". I'd be happy to do
the work if I knew that the changes would actually get rolled in... But
this also requires changes to libapt-pkg so you can get access to this
information. Since this can be a long part of the process its a very
serious usability problem. We also can't get adequate results about
problems during install at the moment.
Anyway, comments, suggestions, referrals appreciated :-)
-Seth
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