[Aptitude-devel] Bug#497206: Fwd: Aptitude wishlist bug with a package - how to get it merged?

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Forwarding, it didn't accept it the first time because the bug was archived...


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>
Date: 2015-09-12 2:02 GMT+01:00
Subject: Re: Aptitude wishlist bug with a package - how to get it merged?
To: 497206 at bugs.debian.org, Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo
<cascardo at minaslivre.org>, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh
<hmh at debian.org>



Hello,

(replying to both messages at bottom...)


2010-07-08 23:29 Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo:
>
> Hello, Daniel.
>
> I've submitted bug 497206 for aptitude with a patch attached almost two
> years ago.  It's a new feature, to allow packages to be grouped by
> source. It's usually easier to upgrade all packages from the same
> source, without having to look for (and sometimes guess) what are the
> other packages from that given source package.
>
> At that time, I've got some feedback (my first implementation required a
> change to apt), and have responded with another patch. I've been missing
> some aptitude upgrades or rebuilding it ever since.
>
> This is a simple patch, since it looks like very much other code already
> in aptitude to group packages by other criteria. I know aptitude has
> lots of reported bugs and maintaining it must really take a lot of time.
>
> I would like to know what I can do to help get this merged.
> Unfortunately, I cannot commit to co-maintain aptitude. But I could help
> fixing any bugs that arise from my patch and those come to my knowledge
> (perhaps, I should subscribe for the aptitude bug list for a while).
>
> At last, I would like to thank you for developing and maintaining this
> great software.
>
> Cheers,
> Cascardo.



2010-07-18 13:23 Henrique de Moraes Holschuh:
>
> On Thu, 08 Jul 2010, Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo wrote:
>>
>> I've submitted bug 497206 for aptitude with a patch attached almost two
>> years ago.  It's a new feature, to allow packages to be grouped by
>> source. It's usually easier to upgrade all packages from the same
>> source, without having to look for (and sometimes guess) what are the
>> other packages from that given source package.
>
>
> Hmm, wishlist seconded, FWLIW.
>
> Grouping by source package is a feature that would help me when I know
> for sure something is broken in unstable and the entire set of binary
> packages from the same source needs to be put in hold...


Thanks for working and providing this patch, refreshing it and insisting
for a long time :-)

For some reason, Daniel Burrows at the time decided not to merge the
part creating the Source View:

 https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/aptitude/aptitude.git/commit/?id=66adb6c872f7b49279da43601e7d3ff199996c1a

 Add a new "source" grouping policy, which groups packages according to
 their source package.

 Closes: #497206; thanks to Thadeu Lima de Sourza Cascardo for the
 patch.

 Didn't merge the part of the patch that adds an entry to the Views
 menu, as I don't personally believe that this grouping needs its own
 entry there.


With the new grouping policy merged, probably you were already making
use of this feature in some way to browse the packages.

But for a long time I thought that some sort of package view would be
useful for other purposes, e.g. to see all binary packages provided by a
library and install also the documentation if it was available, rather
than hop around the package list in other ways.  (search and filtering
works sometimes, but if the package names do not match expectations,
it's a hassle).

Another use is to selectively upgrade all packages coming from the same
source (e.g. util-linux, many binaries and difficult to find because
they have very disparate names), while keeping the rest of the system in
the same state.

Anyway, the point is that I do find it an useful addition, so I decided
to also create a source view, it will be included in the next release.

Since I found the view that you had submitted a bit flat / unappealing
(maybe that's also why Daniel Burrows didn't like it much), I expanded
the grouping "firstchar" to also be able to use source names rather than
binary names, and to also add the top section (e.g. "main").  So the
resulting view looks a bit like browsing the FTP, some feature that I
missed sometimes when working on ports (porters think much more in terms
of source packages than most of the rest of Debian users and devels, I
think).

Anyway, this is an example, limiting the view to the packages matching
"dpkg" and expanding some subtrees, I hope that you like it.


 --\ main - The main Debian archive (21)
   --\ a (1)
     --- apt-dpkg-ref (1)
   --\ d (12)
     --\ dpkg (6)
 i     dpkg                  1.18.2         1.18.2
 p     dpkg:i386             <none>         1.18.2
 i     dpkg-dev              1.18.2         1.18.2
 p     libdpkg-dev           <none>         1.18.2
 p     libdpkg-dev:i386      <none>         1.18.2
 i A   libdpkg-perl          1.18.2         1.18.2
     --- dpkg-awk (1)
     --- dpkg-cross (2)
     --- dpkg-repack (1)
     --- dpkg-sig (1)
     --- dpkg-www (1)
   --\ e (1)
     --- emacs-goodies-el (1)
   --\ h (5)
     --- haskell-dpkg (5)
   --\ libc (1)
     --- libconfig-model-dpkg-perl (1)
   --\ libd (1)
     --- libdpkg-log-perl (1)

Cheers.
--
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>