[Soc-coordination] Britney improvements: report for July 29, 2006

[Baruch Even]

Everything sounds ok to me.

One thing I'm missing, how are things with regard to the original time
line, do you think you'll be able to complete all the tasks in time?

Thanks,
Baruch

Fabio Tranchitella wrote:
> This is the third report for the "Britney improvements" project, which
> is part of Google Summer of Code. As before, the code is hosted within
> the subversion repository of the soc-coordination alioth project [1].
> 
> = Current Status =
> 
> Several bug fixes happened this week, especially related to the
> co-installability check and its algorithm. At the same time, several
> performance improvements were introduced: the new code already runs a
> bit faster than the old one, but more can be achieved sorting the list
> of operations in a smarter way instead of the alphabetical order. This
> has not been done yet since it would be harder to compare the output of
> the two versions if the order of operations is different.
> 
> Data loading has been deeply improved: it is now possible (on my laptop)
> load and pre-parse the dependencies/conflicts in one minute, instead of
> the 2 minutes and half of the previous releases.
> 
> It is now possible to run britney interactively using the
> --architectures and --actions parameters. For example, to check what
> would happen upgrading package foo from unstable to testing and removing
> bar from testing for i386 and amd64 architectures:
> 
> $ python2.4 britney.py -v -c britney.conf --architectures="i386 amd64" \
>                        --actions="foo -bar"
> 
> It is possible to add an interactive interpreter for britney, too, which
> would avoid the data loading which happens for every run of the command
> above, but according Andreas Barth it is not so important so it has been
> deferred.
> 
> = Next task =
> 
> I'm writing the detailed documentation for the co-installability check,
> the support for hints and the HeidiResult writer. After completing these
> tasks (in my opinion beteween today and tomorrow) Andreas Barth will
> setup a comparative environment where the new code will be run on a
> daily basis: this will allow a complete comparation test between the
> output of the old britney and the new one.
> 
> In the meanwhile, a new branch will be started for the development of
> the following new features:
> 
>   * split britney into three different classes: data input/output,
>     excuses generation and upgraderun.
>   * lib transition support (with statistics)
>   * udeb support
> 
> As always, any feedback is welcome.
> 
> = References =
> 
> [1] svn://svn.debian.org/soc/britney/trunk