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

[Daniel Hartwig]

On 28 November 2011 02:11, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo
<manuel.montezelo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

>  - 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?

I have a similar situation to yourself and began looking at this some
months ago.  There are many areas that need working on (error
messages/exit status, limitations of grouping policies, multiarch,
compatible behaviour with apt tools, etc.) along with requests for
minor changes.

An issue in dealing with some of these is that aptitude is dependent
on libapt-pkg for much of it's functionality.  E.g., #502617 and kin
are due to libapt-pkg's handling of config files, which was never
fleshed out with support for a non-destructive read-write cycle.

I have started a list of stale bugs [1] which could be closed and
taken rough notes (currently tidying them) on the general state of
affairs with regards to the reported bugs.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=mandyke@gmail.com;src=aptitude;tag=close-fixed;tag=push

>  - 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 :)

The aptitude interface is unique in the level of sophistication that
it offers making it a real power tool that is (as yet) unmatched by
synaptic and others.

Aptitude is quite functional at the moment, though the amount of open
bug reports unfortunately does not seem to reflect this.  I am sure
that with a more concerted effort to triage the bugs we can at least
get the reports tidied up.

Anyway, that's just my two cents, hopefully you see you are not alone
in your recent investigations :-)