[Soc-coordination] Aptitude search ranking and other improvement

[Obey Arthur Liu]

Federico a écrit :
> Hi all,
> I'm a 2nd year undergraduate student of computer science and I'm
> interested in Aptitude search ranking and presentation (
>
http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2009/Aptitude_search_ranking_and_presentation
> ).
> I'm looking at Xapian web page and I noticed that Xapian doesn't offer
> C++ bindings, so in what language the search algorithm will be
> implemented in aptitude?

Aptitude uses xapian through apt-xapian-index. There's python there. See
Enrico Zini about that.

> I have also a couple of proposals for a better (in my opinion) aptitude:

> 1. I don't understand the aptitude Score system, I can imagine that a
> negative score is bad and a positive one is good but it a mess... For
> example -44 is so bad? And what about -1200? +10 is good? And what
> happen if I proceed the remove even if I've a score of -1000?
> I think the score system is very confusing for a first time user and
> not very helpful. Maybe we can improve it with a more consistent
> documentation and at least a scale for the Score system, in this
> manner I know a solution with a score of 99/100 is far better than a
> 50/100 one.

There's a lot of heuristics involved here. Daniel is also currently
working on the resolver, so things are going to move quite a bit. Maybe
you could help him with that, but it's not for the faint of heart.

> 2. I think is very useful to revert to a pure debian system automatically.
> For example if someone is using an unofficial repository with newer
> package it will be very useful to have aptitude automatically remove
> these third party packages and reinstall official debian version if
> the unofficial repo is removed from source.list. Maybe this won't be
> the default behaviour of aptitude but an user can force this by
> setting a variable in a config file or using a special keyword like
> aptitude revert.

People often forget that Aptitude is only a front-end. To do that, just
put the right (negative if necessary) priorities in your
/etc/apt/preferences file and your unofficial packages will be
automatically removed.

>
> I'll be very glad to work on this project and I hope my proposals are
> in some way useful :)

Keep doing research on your proposals and improve them, it will always
be better. Good luck.

Cheers

Arthur

-- 
Obey Arthur Liu
<http://www.milliways.fr>

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