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

[Daniel Hartwig]

On 15 January 2012 05:29, Diggory Hardy <diggory.hardy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> More seriously, I see that aptitude still uses autotools... fine, though not
> my preference (I found it less work to switch a project to cmake in the
> past).
>
> I got as far as building aptitude tonight, by installing the following
> packages (the last few in the list weren't mentioned by configure, but only
> cropped up when building):
>> libncursesw5-dev libapt-pkg-dev libept-dev libsigc++-2.0-dev
>> libcwidget-dev libvte-dev libboost-dev google-mock libsqlite3-dev po4a
>> librsvg2-bin elinks libcppunit-1.12-1
>

The build files do show a bit of rot.  There are a couple of hints in
debian/rules and the various autotools' files for work needed, in
addition to the more general maintenance.

A previous attempt to use scons was recently aborted:

commit 9343b6214a41e831a501ef7ce7b6981859445baa
Author: Daniel Burrows <dburrows at debian.org>
Date:   Sat Apr 2 11:10:01 2011 -0700

    Nuke the scons build scripts.


> I also had several errors of this form, which mean nothing to me:
>> Error: no ID for constraint linkend:
>> configCmdLine-Safe-Upgrade-No-New-Installs.
>> Error: no ID for constraint linkend:
>> configCmdLine-Safe-Upgrade-Show-Resolver-Actions.

Docbook errors from the user's manual.