On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 06:16:58PM +0200, Eddy Petrișor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> was heard to say: > On 14/01/2008, Daniel Burrows <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > All my discussions with Enrico in the past have indicated that the > > right thing to do is to use libdebtag/libapt-front/libept, which will > > keep up with the debtags format as it changes and also not suck speed-wise. > > > > I added support for libept to the source tree recently, but I haven't > > decided yet whether to enable support in the next Debian upload. There > > are a few ugly things about this, like that apparently it forces the user > > to run "debtags update" manually, rather than just doing apt updates as > > usual. > > That doesn't sound like a show stopper. Is that the only issue?
There's also the issue of adding more dependencies to aptitude, which puts more load on the release team. I also noticed that ept build-depends on Boost, which I have no problem with, but again I don't know how -release feels about that. Last time I raised the issue of using it in aptitude they asked me not to, but that was circa 2005 IIRC. Incidentally, the update problem may be less bad than I thought -- I was under the impression that tags would totally break if "debtags update" wasn't run, but it looks like debtags ships with some basic data. I could have sworn I tested this, but maybe I was thinking of the case where debtags was completely missing. > To me (as a user) is really clear what should happen for the issue you raised: > > I simply don't care that there is another component behind aptitude > that provides it with more info. As long as I don't see that component > as a different application, which I don't in debtags' case, apt-get > update/aptitude upadate should automatically pull in a debtags update. How does aptitude provide progress indication for a debtags download? What if something goes wrong (e.g., network error)? How does it get indicated? On my computer, when I take the network interface down "debtags update" exits successfully with no output. Does debtags ever write to standard error? (presumably it does, so I'll have to write code to catch standard error so it doesn't scribble on the screen) Does it have a standardized output protocol that I could parse to extract messages or does it write plain text? > To put it simple, apt(itude) update should wrap a debtags update, too. > If is not possible, that sounds like a debtags bug. I don't know if it's possible or not. It seems like the sort of thing that should be in a lower-level library, but this certainly wouldn't be the first time aptitude has had to fill in a gap. Daniel
