[Soc-coordination] Britney improvements: report for June 25, 2006

[Fabio Tranchitella]

This is the first report for the "Britney improvements" project, which
is part of Google Summer of Code.

= Current Status =

The first goal of the project was to rewrite britney back-end in python,
getting rid of the custom dpkg source code. In this way, the code would
be easier to read and maintain and we could probably get rid of the
memory leaks which are actually causing random segfaults.

Although my first idea was to complete this task before the end of the
month, I'm not sure if I'll be able to respect this timeline. The code
(actually hosted in the subversion repository of the soc-coordination
alioth project [1]), is completed for the excuses generation but I need
more work for the UpgradeRun phase.

The output for the excuses is exactly the same of the old Britney code,
which is a good compatibility point, but the script is obviously slower
then the original one. This is quite normal because I make no use of
extensions written in C but for the moment performances are not
considered.

The new britney code is written in python using python-apt extension,
with almost all the application logic taken from the code of the old
britney. All the code has been deeply documented using both docstrings
and informative comments. The api documentation is produced with doxygen
(see doc/ directory) in both HTML and LaTeX format.
 
= Next goal =

During the next week, I'll work on the UpgradeRun code to complete the
rewrite. I hope it won't take more then one or two weeks, and after it
will be completed it will be possible to add new features (eg. smart
dependency handling to get rid of hints and udeb support).

At that stage, a command line interface will be added: in this way,
developers and release team will be able to run Britney in an
interactive way.

= Comments and feedback =

The project does not have a mailing list, so the best way to provide
feedback, suggestion or questions is to email me (kobold at debian.org) and
Andreas Barth (aba at debian.org).

[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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