Bug#590088: apt: source package handling is slow and cumbersome

[Julian Andres Klode <jak@debian.org>]

On Do, 2010-06-10 at 15:19 +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> Package: python-apt
> Version: 0.7.94.2
> Severity: normal
> 
> Ideally, though, I'd like source package records to be more like
> first-class citizens in apt/python-apt rather than feeling a bit like
> afterthoughts, and to have their own cache and wrapper objects so that
> e.g. apt.SourceCache()[src] can return an apt.Package.Source object,
> which might have methods like fetch_source() and
> install_build_dependencies() as well as offering attribute access.
> Would this be at all feasible?

I have an idea which rewrites source packages into binary ones, and
build-dependencies to standard dependencies.

Let's imagine we have the source package foobar:
    Package: foobar
    Architecture: any
    Build-Depends: foo [i386], bar [amd64]

There are three solutions I can imagine:

[SOL-A]  foobar:src:i386 depends on foo
         foobar:src:amd64 depends on bar
[SOL-B]  foobar:src depends on foo:i386 | bar:amd64
[SOL-C]  foobar:src depends on foo[i386] | bar[amd64] 

SOL-A should work right out of the box with all features APT supports,
SOL-B doesn't really work, and SOL-C would require lots of work. We
would strip out any information about architectures not listed in
APT::Architectures, though.
-- 
Julian Andres Klode  - Debian Developer, Ubuntu Member

See http://wiki.debian.org/JulianAndresKlode and http://jak-linux.org/.