[Soc-coordination] [GSoC] KDE4/Qt4 based package manager

[Obey Arthur Liu]

Christian Perrier a écrit :
> Quoting Obey Arthur Liu (arthur at milliways.fr):
> 
>>> synaptic or shaman (from Chakra). I think that aptitude-gtk and adept
>>> are not userfriendly. Using these applications was quite difficult for
>> Heartfelt thank yous! (I'm the guy responsible for aptitude-gtk.. :D )
> 
> 
> Is this silly to think that, as most of the (good) work was made in
> aptitude-gtk, an aptitude-qt development would be a better idea?
> 
> Aptitude has all the nice underlying package management stuff and that
> would avoid reinventing the wheel.

This issue has been discussed too. The decision isn't simple.

The actors:
- Synaptic
Some people don't like it, that's all I will say :)

- Aptitude(-gtk)
Aptitude-gtk is still a development branch, targeted for stable in
Squeeze. Beside the new GTK+ GUI, Daniel Burrows is currently spending
time on heavy development on the resolver to make it faster, more
predictable and so on, plus a few other things. Daniel will not have the
time to manage the development of two graphical interfaces (in addition
to the console and ncurses interfaces..) at once.
Also, due the way the aptitude-gtk interface had been designed, not a
great amount of the code that has been written last summer can be easily
reused for a Qt interface. There has never been any plans to handle more
than one GUI at once in the codebase (3 UIs is already quite a lot).

- Adept 3.0
Petr Rockai had been working on Adept 3.0, a complete rewrite of Adept
with Qt4 and a different, more task-based, interface. Petr has since
stopped the development of Adept[3] at beta~4, citing the choice of
PackageKit as default on Ubuntu as a reason. He's open to giving
maintainership to another developer and the code is in good shape.

- (K)PackageKit
Please Google or read MLs or whatever to understand why this is a..
suboptimal solution.

My opinion on this is that, even if Debian defaults on Gnome, KDE users
should be on a equal footing. They shouldn't be more forced to use a
GTK+ package manager than Gnome users should be forced to us a Qt
package manager. For the sake of simplicity, I realize that I am
approximating out users of other WMs.

Note that Adept 3 has a different UI paradigm than aptitude(-gtk), so it
should be interesting to explore in its own sake. Also, Petr Rockai has
been maintaining libept[4] (with Enrico Zini), a high-level package
management library, that is commonly used by Aptitude and Adept and has
also been orphaned, so there's a little more interest to it here.

Furthermore, there is a possibility that in the future, the (new and
currently developed) dependency resolver of Aptitude would spun out in
its own library so that other package managers, like Adept 3, can use it.

Heard of apt-xapian-index[5] ? Want useful a ranking of package search
results in Aptitude ? in packages.debian.org ? Want to index changelogs,
descriptions ? With keyword highlighting ?

There's definitely a lot of fascinating development perspective around
package management. What do you all think ?

Cheers

Arthur

[1]
<http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/blog/entry/aptitude-gtk-updates-2008-12-23/>
[2]
<http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/blog/entry/help-aptitude-get-faster/>
[3] <http://web.mornfall.net/blog/farewell__44___adept.html>
[4] <http://web.mornfall.net/libept.html>
[5] <http://www.enricozini.org/2007/debtags/apt-xapian-index.html>

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

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