Obey Arthur Liu: State of the Aptitude (week 12)
Hi folks!
We're almost done for the official Summer of Code program and I thought that I couldn't let it end without another update, so here we are (you may thank Daniel Burrows for additional poking).
The Gtk+ interface for Aptitude is making great progress. The product is not final yet but already implements many of the planned ideas, with others to come.
So, let's see the tasks presented in my previous update:
In some more details: we are now much closer to the final interface. Some things are not done yet, for example, notification bars la Iceweasel (or is it Firefox ?) are in the works for unobtrusive notifications about important things and a little guidance.
We are much more reliable now. We eliminated lots of memory management problems that resulted from, mmh, imperfect coding discipline. We also lock the interface when important backend stuff reload to prevent the user from shooting himself in the foot when triggering an install when the APT cache is reloading for example.. The backend refactoring took a sizable part of this second term but it was worth it. The code is now much cleaner and uses no more (at least much fewer) ugly unscalable hacks.
One very important feature of Aptitude is the ability to easily display all kinds of dependencies and navigate through them by hyperlinking. It's now working in the Gtk+ interface as well. Feel free to click on whatever looks like a package or a package version.
We now support the powerful Aptitude package searching syntax. Daniel Burrows is talking with Enrico Zini to bring the power of apt-xapian-index to Aptitude: autocompletion! lightning fast full-text searches! tag clouds! ponies!
There is still a lot to be done. I'm not going away after the GSoC program. I'm here to stay, for Aptitude and Debian. Daniel Burrows has been very helpful and supportive. The Debian community is as awesome as I knew it before participating in the program.
Daniel Burrows is planning to merge the Gtk+ interface into the main branch in September and packages may appear into Experimental. With the very interesting evolutions of the upcoming Adept-3, Lenny+1 will show very interesting changes in the area of packages managers.
Now for you. I need you to test my interface. All necessary instructions are on the development trac : http://dev.graffit.net/aptitude/trac.
We're almost done for the official Summer of Code program and I thought that I couldn't let it end without another update, so here we are (you may thank Daniel Burrows for additional poking).
The Gtk+ interface for Aptitude is making great progress. The product is not final yet but already implements many of the planned ideas, with others to come.
Here are the screenies:
So, let's see the tasks presented in my previous update:
- A real user interface <- much progress here
- Being reliable <- check! we don't crash all the time anymore
- Packages dependencies, pre-dependencies, etc. <- check!
- Hyperlinks between packages <- check!
- Advanced package search <- check!
- Tags support (tag clouds ?) <- well, no clouds yet, but we have tags
- Linking with interesting data sources like popcon <- not done yet
- A lot of interesting things <- well..
In some more details: we are now much closer to the final interface. Some things are not done yet, for example, notification bars la Iceweasel (or is it Firefox ?) are in the works for unobtrusive notifications about important things and a little guidance.
We are much more reliable now. We eliminated lots of memory management problems that resulted from, mmh, imperfect coding discipline. We also lock the interface when important backend stuff reload to prevent the user from shooting himself in the foot when triggering an install when the APT cache is reloading for example.. The backend refactoring took a sizable part of this second term but it was worth it. The code is now much cleaner and uses no more (at least much fewer) ugly unscalable hacks.
One very important feature of Aptitude is the ability to easily display all kinds of dependencies and navigate through them by hyperlinking. It's now working in the Gtk+ interface as well. Feel free to click on whatever looks like a package or a package version.
We now support the powerful Aptitude package searching syntax. Daniel Burrows is talking with Enrico Zini to bring the power of apt-xapian-index to Aptitude: autocompletion! lightning fast full-text searches! tag clouds! ponies!
There is still a lot to be done. I'm not going away after the GSoC program. I'm here to stay, for Aptitude and Debian. Daniel Burrows has been very helpful and supportive. The Debian community is as awesome as I knew it before participating in the program.
Daniel Burrows is planning to merge the Gtk+ interface into the main branch in September and packages may appear into Experimental. With the very interesting evolutions of the upcoming Adept-3, Lenny+1 will show very interesting changes in the area of packages managers.
Now for you. I need you to test my interface. All necessary instructions are on the development trac : http://dev.graffit.net/aptitude/trac.