[Aptitude-devel] About status of aptitude-gtk -- split off into separate source package? (GSoC project?)

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Hi,

2012/3/20 Daniel Hartwig <mandyke at gmail.com>:
> Another issue to consider is that the package manager landscape is
> changing in recent years.  There is now things like PackageKit which
> we can expect to produce very high quality PM interfaces for the
> various toolkits.  There are also many existing PM's that provide a
> very good interface under GTK+, etc.
>
> Aptitude-curses has a unique place in this environment.  However, it
> has proven difficult to translate this to Qt and GTK+ interfaces and
> keep everything in sync between them.  It might be time to simply
> delegate the -qt and -gtk interfaces to the archives.

After thinking a bit more about this, I would prefer just to ship -gtk
(not sure if -qt is in even more "basic" state) until freeze, adding a
piece of NEWS about the future removal, then remove it if nothing
happens -- so it doesn't enter the next stable relase.

This way it would give an opportunity for a few more months for people
to step up without requiring more effort, and if not picked up by
somebody, just "move it to archives".

aptitude-gtk at the moment is not like an amazing piece of work that
needs just a few touches here and there to be at its brightest again.
I do not think that anybody will miss it what it delivers now or in
the past, only *maybe* what it can deliver in the future, but there's
seem to be no manpower inclined to do that.  It's an incomplete
project that needs major effort to be useful and be good/different
enough from other competing projects.  As you say, there are other
tools now providing similar and better experience that what -gtk
delivers.

So basically, I don't think that we need to spend more time/effort
with this, splitting in different source packages and so on.  We can
give it a last chance, but if it's going to survive, somebody will
have to step up to do the major up-lifting.  In that case, the
source-split is not very significant amount of work compared to the
rest.

Cheers.