RFH: APT
[Please always CC me on list postings]
Hi Everybody,
It seems I no longer have time to make forward progress on the APT bug
list - essentially bugs are being filed faster than I can deal with them -
which is to say I don't have all that much time, not that there are so
many bugs :> Most of the interesting bugs have been eliminated years ago,
substantial parts of the codebase have been largely unchanged for the
better part of 4 years.
But there are still a number of odd corner cases that people find, and of
course spelling errors in the man pages, plus a couple of larger issues.
Many things have been delt with in the CVS version, some 55 seperate bug
reports have been addressed, including some of the fairly large items a
few people have been wanting. However, there hasn't been a new release in
over a year.
But, I also know this version has at least 1, and perhaps 2, real show
stopper problems - that is to say for 90% of the population it is a
disimprovement to the venerable 0.5.4 version everyone uses now.
Since APT is such a widely used package I absolutely don't want to inflict
this on the project without having some way to deal with any problems in a
timely manner. Thus the request for help..
I think I would find two things fairly usefull:
Circulate some debs for the CVS version and determine how buggy it
actually is. This will probably require actually going and making the
packaging scripts conform to the latest policy, I'm sure somethings have
changed since this was last done.
Try to do something with the BTS. There are alot of bugs filed, and lots
of them have very poor information. Some are actually quite trivial I
think, it just takes some effort to construct the situation that is
described.
The CVS root is: :ext:cvs.debian.org:/cvs/deity module 'apt'
Beyond that it would be cool if someone was interested enough in some of
the smaller/large features people want to actually try and implement
them..
Thanks,
Jason
apt (0.5.5) unstable; urgency=low
* Fix handling of [!arch] for build-dependencies. Closes: #88798, #149595
* Fix handling of build-deps on unknown packages. Closes: #88664, #153307
* "apt-get --arch-only build-dep" to install only architecture-
dependent build dependencies. Bump minor shared lib number to reflect
small change in BuildDepend API.
* APT::Build-Essential configuration option (defaults to "build-essential")
so that "apt-get build-dep" will ensure build essential packages are
installed prior to installing other build-dependencies. Closes: #148879
* LD_LIBRARY_PATH thing. Closes: #109430, #147529
* /usr/doc reference in postinst. Closes: #126189
* Doc updates. Closes: #120689
* Possible apt-cache segfault. Closes: #120311, #118431, #117915, #135295,
#131062, #136749
* Print special message for EAI_AGAIN. Closes: #131397
* libapt-pkg-dev needs to bring in the apt-inst library if linking
is to work. Closes: #133943
* Typos, Doc Stuff. Closes: #132772, #129970, #123642, #114892, #113786,
#109591, #105920, #103678, #139752, #138186, #138054, #138050,
#139994, #142955, #151654, #151834, #147611, #154268
* Fix possibility for tag file parsing to fail in some unlikely situations.
Closes: #139328
* Use std C++ names for some header files. Closes: #128741
* Do not check for free space if --no-download. Closes: #117856
* Actually implement or group handling for 'upgrade'. Closes: #133950
* "Internal Error, Couldn't configure pre-depend" is not actually an
internal error, it is a packaging error and now it says so, and
pinpoints the problem dependency. Closes: #155621
* Allows failure to write to a pipe for post-invoke stuff. Closes: #89830
* Use usr/share/doc for dhelp. Closes: #115701
* --print-uris works with 'update'. Closes: #57070
* Options Dpkg::MaxArgs,Dpkg::MaxArgBytes to allow a much longer dpkg
command line.
* Fixed 2 little OR group bugs, thanks to Yann Dirson. Closes: #143995,
#142298
* Allow an uninstalled package to be marked for removal on an install
line (meaning not to automatically install it), also fix some dodgy
handling of protected packages. Closes: #92287, #116011
* Fix errant prefix matching in version selection. Closes: #105968
* Ensure that all files needed to run APT as a user are readable and
ignore roots umask for these files. Closes: #108801
* Support larger config spaces. Closes: #111914
* 'apt-get update' no longer does 'Building Dependency Tree'.
* When matching regexs allways print a message. Change regex activation
charset. Closes: #147817
* Don't die if lines in sources.list are too long. Closes: #146846
* Show file name on apt-extracttemplate error messges. Closes: #151835
* i18n gettext stuff, based on work from Michael Piefel
* Some highly unlikely memory faults. Closes: #155842
* C++ stuff for G++3.2. Closes: #162617
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