[Soc-coordination] Britney improvements: report for July 29, 2006

[Fabio Tranchitella]

This is the third report for the "Britney improvements" project, which
is part of Google Summer of Code. As before, the code is hosted within
the subversion repository of the soc-coordination alioth project [1].

= Current Status =

Several bug fixes happened this week, especially related to the
co-installability check and its algorithm. At the same time, several
performance improvements were introduced: the new code already runs a
bit faster than the old one, but more can be achieved sorting the list
of operations in a smarter way instead of the alphabetical order. This
has not been done yet since it would be harder to compare the output of
the two versions if the order of operations is different.

Data loading has been deeply improved: it is now possible (on my laptop)
load and pre-parse the dependencies/conflicts in one minute, instead of
the 2 minutes and half of the previous releases.

It is now possible to run britney interactively using the
--architectures and --actions parameters. For example, to check what
would happen upgrading package foo from unstable to testing and removing
bar from testing for i386 and amd64 architectures:

$ python2.4 britney.py -v -c britney.conf --architectures="i386 amd64" \
                       --actions="foo -bar"

It is possible to add an interactive interpreter for britney, too, which
would avoid the data loading which happens for every run of the command
above, but according Andreas Barth it is not so important so it has been
deferred.

= Next task =

I'm writing the detailed documentation for the co-installability check,
the support for hints and the HeidiResult writer. After completing these
tasks (in my opinion beteween today and tomorrow) Andreas Barth will
setup a comparative environment where the new code will be run on a
daily basis: this will allow a complete comparation test between the
output of the old britney and the new one.

In the meanwhile, a new branch will be started for the development of
the following new features:

  * split britney into three different classes: data input/output,
    excuses generation and upgraderun.
  * lib transition support (with statistics)
  * udeb support

As always, any feedback is welcome.

= References =

[1] svn://svn.debian.org/soc/britney/trunk

-- 
Fabio Tranchitella <kobold at debian.org>                        .''`.
Proud Debian GNU/Linux developer, admin and user.            : :'  :
                                                             `. `'`
   http://people.debian.org/~kobold/                           `-
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