Hi, I would like to propose the following project with me as student and Michael Vogt as proforma mentor, but before officially applying want to gather some opinions about me and applying for said project: = Project: APT↔dpkg communication rework = APT-based tools like apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, … work with the user to figure out how their system should look like after they are done installing/removing packages and their dependencies. The actual installation/removal of packages is done by dpkg with the constrain that dependencies must be fulfilled at any point in time (e.g. to run maintainer scripts). Historically APT has a super micro-management approach to this task which hasn't aged that well over the years mostly ignoring changes in dpkg and growing into an unmaintainable mess hardly anyone can debug and everyone fears to touch – especially as more and more requirements are tacked onto it like handling cycles and triggers, dealing with "important" packages first, package sources on removable media, touch minimal groups to be able to interrupt the process if needed (e.g. unattended-upgrades) which not only sky-rocket complexity but also can to be mutually exclusive as you e.g. can't have minimal groups and minimal trigger executions at the same time. The idea is to introduce an architecture similar to the "External Dependency Solver Protocol" (EDSP) allowing different implementations (and hence strategies) to be used interchangeably starting with the current one and a second doing the minimal amount of work and instead trying to work closer together with dpkg versions from this millennium (yes, that is how old that code is). *Confirmed Mentor*: Michael Vogt *Contact*: deity@lists.debian.org and #debian-apt = David Kalnischkies (me) = I was a GSoC student back in 2010 already with "MultiArch in APT" (for Debian if you haven't guessed that much) which converted me from a semi- regular contributor to one of the current main developers, so me applying again would certainly fail the outreach aspect. I am entertaining the idea of applying in the light of the "flip bits instead of burgers" aspect through as I think that it would benefit Debian greatly if someone could be convinced to invest a substantial amount of time into it, but nobody had such an amount of free time available and that is unlikely to change given the projects scope and unappealing work involved, which I would declare (way) too big for a newcomer to APT to have a realistic stab at – based also on previous more limited projects the APT team had mentored in this area. As said, I would like to ask for opinions about the sensibility of me applying given this situation to avoid wasting time on both sides in case a formal appliance is downright futile. Best regards David Kalnischkies
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