[Aptitude-devel] About the status and plans for aptitude

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Hi all,

(Sending to deity@, aptitude-devel at alioth and Daniel Burrows.  I am subscribed
to the MLs, no need to CC me).

I am a long time Debian user, I started to use Debian before aptitude existed (I
used dselect by then).  I've been using aptitude since shortly after it appeared
under the radar, and I have been using it happily since.  So I decided that I
could collaborate to develop the code and/or help with packaging.

I wrote to Daniel Burrows by the beginning of the month telling more or less the
same.  Since I've been looking at the current state of the package, I know that
the development has been somewhat estagnated as of late, and there is a lot of
pending stuff queuing, even if many of them are minor things.  I stressed the
point that I am not sure if I can do this all alone, because aptitude is very
widely used and, given its role, a little mistake can have vast and unpleasant
consequences -- both in terms of people affected and by the severity of them
(e.g. system unusable after that).

I got no reply, and I sent a ping yesterday, just in case.  I know that it's not
that much time and that he can easily be busy with work, on holidays, attending
family matters or having fun elsewhere... but I think that it's prudent at this
time to start asking other people involved.  I'm also CCing him in this email.

So, some of the questions (feel free to expand) that I am interested in hearing
opinions about:

 - Does anybody know what's the current status and future plans for Aptitude?

 - Does Cupt, Apt2 or some of the ongoing efforts based on PackageKit provide a
   complete replacement for what Aptitude is used today?

 - Is there anyone interested in reviving the project, or that at least
   considered seriously the idea lately?

 - Does Debian as a whole think that it's worth pursuing?  Maybe everybody is
   using just apt, synaptic or something else doing the task much better, and I
   didn't realise :)


Regards.