On 15 January 2012 03:06, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Diggory, welcome aboard, > > 2012/1/14 Diggory Hardy <[email protected]>: >> Unlike Christian and Axel I do have C++ skills, so maybe I can be >> useful somewhere. >> >> So how might I best be of use? > > Daniel Hartwig actually investigated and gave some thought to the > areas that need improvements, e.g. to cope with multi-arch > requirements or refactoring and fixing some areas causing many > troubles. > > Maybe he can share his thoughts in this list soon, so people can start > picking tasks. >
A rough coredump: * Build infrastructure Currently autotools (which I have a certain fondness for), but needs a fair amount of maintenance. Could optionally move to a different system as another poster mentioned. * Dependency resolver Lots of bug reports, some of them not too useful. There are lots of situations that still seem to cause aptitude trouble, but I have not looked in to this at all. * Group policy / tree view The biggest concern here is that there are problems when a package has multiple versions available and/or should be placed in to several groups instead of one. The current code basically treats all available versions of a package as a single entity, even though this can result in incorrect grouping. The bug that brought this to my attention [1] involved a package changing from non-free to main between releases -- the package appeared only under non-free. A more detailed note about the issue is available [2] on another bug about grouping by origin server. I no longer consider the proposed solution in the footnote to be adequate -- this is a very large task and needs to be done thoroughly, especially for excellent multiarch support (by-arch grouping policy should not produce incorrect results for packages in multiple archs). [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=624706 [2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=603269#21 * Multiarch Aptitude has no support for multiarch setups. A certain derivative has already shipped with m-a enabled and they are receiving a number of bug reports against aptitude concerning this (apparently no one told their users not to use aptitude + m-a). Judging by the ongoing effort from the dpkg and apt teams and interest from other parties, Wheezy is probably going to have m-a support also. I am yet to thoroughly investigate all the work required, however, it is certainly possible to have some support in aptitude ready for the freeze (proposed for June IIRC). IMO, this will require: - a couple of people to investigate and devise an action plan - (the same) couple of people to develop the changes according to that plan - *testers* across many architectures and m-a/non-m-a setups At the very least, aptitude should become aware of multiarch packages and this means support for libapt-pkg's GrpIterator. I plan to get started on this immediately after finishing the few things I am currently working on (i.e. Real Soon Now) * Matching / search pattern handlers Not a major issue but there is a lot of room there for, e.g., removing redundancy. Also a number of bugs [3] where the patterns don't interact the way that one would expect, etc.. [3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=aptitude;dist=unstable;[email protected];tag=matching * Scheme This is something that I plan to look at post-multiarch as I personally feel that at least the grouping policies (tree view code) could benefit greatly from being implemented in a language well-suited to handling trees and lists in a general way -- i.e. Scheme or similar. *** Of course, aptitude involves a decent amount of code with many places to work on. It is also quite modular, so one can happily work on, e.g., the group policy code without knowing about the dependency resolver. Those interested in bug triage or fixing minor issues can see my recent post on usertags [4] which may be of assistance (bugs I have usertagged are, generally, already triaged). [4] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/aptitude-devel/2012-January/001808.html Happy hacking! _______________________________________________ Aptitude-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aptitude-devel
