[Aptitude-devel] Plans for aptitude 0.5.0 - 0.6.0.

[Daniel Burrows]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 08:15:48PM -0700, Daniel Burrows <dburrows at debian.org> was heard to say:
>     * Xapian support in search patterns.

  (snip)

>     * Support for interactively editing search patterns.

  (snip)

  This took quite a bit longer than I expected for various reasons.
Partly just that I spent time on my real life instead of working on
aptitude, partly that a few minor details turned out to be complicated,
and partly that I ended up trying to figure out how to represent match
results in a way that would permit highlighting matches (with partial
success: I think I've solved a few representational problems, but
there's probably more work before we can do provide all the feedback
that I'd like).

  Anyway, the rewritten search engine is now on par with the old one,
as far as I can tell, although it's only hooked up to "aptitude search".
The next steps are:

  1. Implement Xapian support for real -- shouldn't be too painful,
     I hope.

  2. Implement some new patterns to manipulate the set of versions
     being examined (the "pool"); I left room for this while redesigning
     the match process but didn't actually implement them.

  3. Overhaul the documentation to more carefully explain how searching
     work now.

  4. Implement that GUI editor (it shouldn't be hard to get a basic
     skeleton with poor UI, now that the backend data structure is
     more transparent).

  Daniel