[Aptitude-devel] Removing GTK+, Qt from the tree [was Re: Bug#537858: aptitude: comments on i18n]

[Daniel Hartwig]

On 10 February 2014 00:24, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo
<manuel.montezelo at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's a bug report asking for Qt by the way, with no action for ~2
> years.  I would be interested (and indeed, that's one of the reasons
> that brought me to aptitude), but then there are so many other things
> to do...
>
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=526812
>

This is something worth investigating, at least with a quick prototype
or two.    It should help identify what are the current options, and
what issues and changes may be necessary in the rest of aptitude to
support this.

Based on reading some of the existing Qt interface progress reports,
it appears that the original author had to reimplement some other
aptitude functionality to better support his choice of widgets.  It is
not fresh in my mind, but I believe there was also duplicating
PkgIterators or parts of them (names, etc.) for the data object behind
the display widget.

Investigating new interfaces is highly valuable, IMO, as part of the
overall effort to restructure and cleanup the internals.  Currently
the direction is based only on my own experience working with the
curses (cwidget) and cmdline modules, and does not include any
understanding of issues associated with toolkits such as Qt or GTK+,
should there be any.  I am vaguely aware that these have tree or list
display objects that rely on underlying data objects, and that
aptitudes internal types may not be suitable for efficiently providing
the data.

Any information gained from such an exercise is highly valued.

Regards