Re: Gnome-apt hmm
On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Lalo Martins wrote:
>
> Perhaps, if it finds out it can't lock/write to stuff, it could
> print a warning, then make a copy and work on the copy? Perhaps
> it could ask for root's password if you're not root and
>
> * you tell it to do a run, and
>
> * if you made modifications to the selections, when you quit
> gnome-apt perhaps it should ask `enter root's password to save
> changes or press "cancel" to scrap them'?
>
Unless it's suid (not possible, it would open about 1000 security holes),
there's no way for it to change its uid to 0 anyway so if you start as
non-root there's no way to change that.
It would be nice to be able to load and save the current state of the
package tree; then you could save the state as a regular user, and re-load
it as root. Also gnome-apt wouldn't forget your settings when exited. I
could do this pretty trivially with the gnome-xml package, but it might
cause weirdness sometimes, since some of the state is also in the status
file and things could get out of sync. (And it would add another
library... yikes!)
> > Oh, I see the problem. Thanks for the specific example. I'm not clipping
> > the red GC I was using to draw broken packages. Non-red text is clipped,
> > right?
>
> Hmm no, not in my system. All text overlaps here.
>
Anyone else seeing this? I can't reproduce it for the non-red text.
> Well I have a nice piece of input for you. According to the dpkg
> manuals (well somewhere), the description _should_ be
> reformatted. Also, "blank" lines (those with a ".") should be
> displayed as blank lines (not the "."). There is one special
> case of lines that shouldn't be reformatted. From
> internals.html (ch-descriptions.html):
>
[snip]
That is very helpful. I guess that's what Jason was talking about when he
said he was going to change the LongDescription() code in apt-pkg.
> There is a problem where reformatting descriptions adds more
> processing overhead... but should be worth it, no?
>
Nah, that's totally trivial processing, and it's only for one package at a
time.
The only place we have to worry about overhead is on operations that
affect the entire package tree, or anything that requires adding data
members to every package. Or possibly, if apt-pkg did the formatting
on the fly, it could slow down a full text search.
Havoc
Reply to: