Re: aptitude plans for the squeeze cycle
On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 02:41:08PM +0200, Marc Brockschmidt <marc@marcbrockschmidt.de> was heard to say:
> Heya,
>
> As announced on dda [RT1], we want to get an impression when releasing
> Squeeze is feasible. We have proposed a (quite ambitious) freeze in December
> 2009, and some developers have noted that their planned changes wouldn't be
> possible in this time frame. So, to find out when releasing would work for
> most people, it would be great if you could answer the following questions:
>
> Do you have any big changes planned? How much time would they take, and
> what consequences are there for the rest of the project?
The main thing is that I want to get aptitude 0.6.0 into squeeze. In
addition to some general fixes and improvements, the dependency solver
should run five times faster on large problems than the current release
of aptitude does. Hopefully this will mitigate the problems that I
heard about with it taking a long time to calculate the upgrade to
lenny.
This means that I'll have to scale back my ambitions for that release.
Specifically, I don't think the GTK+ frontend will be ready to be the
default interface by December, so I've decided to focus on tying up
loose ends and getting a build put together where the GTK+ code is an
experimental add-on, not the default package (which mostly comes down
to adjusting package dependencies and alternative priorities).
I'm currently finishing up some code to cache data that's been
downloaded for display in the UI, such as screenshots and changelogs.
I also want to disable the full-text search of package descriptions
by default; user feedback on that change has been uniformly negative.
Once those changes are in and tested, I think I'll be ready to
release 0.6.0.
> How many "big" transitions will the upcoming changes cause? When should those
> happen? Can we do something to make them easier?
I don't expect aptitude's changes to impact many other packages.
The changes mostly fall into a few categories:
(1) New GTK+ interface: purely a UI change, and won't be installed by
default in 0.6.0.
(2) New searching code: as noted above, the full-text search will be
switched off. The whole search engine has been rewritten from
scratch; however, the search language should be the same as it
was before.
(3) Dependency solver optimizations: should be transparent to users.
(4) Dependency solver enhancements: tighter constraints can be
placed on what the solver returns, and the solver's treatment of
particular packages can be overridden in /etc/apt/apt.conf.
Should not impact other packages, except that it makes it possible
to give hints to the resolver (this could be used to, e.g.,
provide a recommended apt.conf stanza to make the upgrade smoother
and avoid known resolver problems). If the release team would
like different hints than the few that are available currently, I
would be happy to add some more knobs here.
(5) General enhancements and bugfixes: I don't expect that these will
have an impact on other software.
Daniel
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