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

[Julian Andres Klode]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 01:44:10AM +0100, David Kalnischkies wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 19:11, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo
> <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> First, define for what aptitude is used nowadays, then we can answer that -
> maybe. Personally, while i have never used aptitude, i wouldn't say that
> either of these is a direct competitor to aptitude.
> PackageKit is bound to dbus, something you seldom find on e.g. servers while
> as far as i know cupt and "apt2" don't have a curses interface planed or
> even implemented, but as a die hard APT user who never touched the others
> that's only guesswork.

In my view, two things are important:

	* Complex search expressions
	* Interactive, better, solver
	* Curses user interface

For me, the search expressions are important, and the solver. They
can help in partial upgrades or complex searches. I'll soon propose
some changes to APT's solver to make certain things better (I want
an upgrade command that can remove automatically installed packages
and install new packages).

> In that vision, the biggest problem for aptitude to face currently are
> problems it has with multiarch. I implemented it in APT in a way i hoped
> it would make it possible to sell multiarch as singlearch to the frontends.
> This (surprisingly) works for a lot of cases, but from the folks from ubuntu
> i heard different stuff about aptitude performance in multiarch environment
> (we don't have it in debian yet, so i rely here on chit-chat - bear with me)
> so i guess certain codepaths depend on singlearch more than others do.

aptitude has performance problems in any environment, they just
get more noticeable with more packages.


-- 
Julian Andres Klode  - Debian Developer, Ubuntu Member

See http://wiki.debian.org/JulianAndresKlode and http://jak-linux.org/.