[Aptitude-devel] Bug#677551: Let's get rid of libept

[David Kalnischkies]

(just saying and therefore not to the bug but to the mailinglist)

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 9:21 AM, Enrico Zini <enrico at debian.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 12:41:17PM +0800, Daniel Hartwig wrote:
> I'm not sure many applications actually need special parsers for data in
> /var/lib/debtags/: libapt has Tag fields, /var/lib/debtags/vocabulary can
> be parsed with standard Packages file parsers, and apt-xapian-index provides
> fast boolean tag queries using stable libraries available in most languages.

libapt doesn't have Tag fields. You can access the Tag field with in a
package record with RecordField("Tag"), but that isn't really nice.
It would be cool if we would add a new method Tag() which returns a
list of tags, rather than this blob.

I also wanted to explore the possibility to add tags to the binary cache -
not all tags as if you really want to search you are better of using xapian,
but having some tags available as hints for resolvers and co could be handy
(e.g. role::metapackage or role::app-data).

But if someone is faster than me implementing it, I wouldn't be angry. ;)
(both needs an ABI break, so not material for wheezy)


Best regards

David Kalnischkies