[Soc-coordination] Summer of Code Ideas

[David Kalnischkies]

Hi Chris,


as i haven't packaged anything for the archive so far i will not comment
your first idea, but as last year student working on APT let me comment
the second as i did it for another student already:

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 21:14, Chris Baines <cbaines8 at gmail.com> wrote:
> My second idea came from my recent usage of debdelta, a amazing tool
> to reduce download size and increase speed when updating Debian,
> perfect if like me you are on a slow internet connection. I would be
> looking to integrate it with apt-get and/or aptitude and improve the
> program its self by implementing a method of predicting the best
> approach for fetching the debs, and possibly looking at how to provide
> debdeltas in a better more comprehensive way, perhaps by allowing
> normal apt repositories to provide them?

As always, implement it in APT (or libapt for that matter) and use it in
all front-ends instead of somewhere up the dependency tree as this will
simple destroy the possibility of sharing -- we have a lot of tools working
with packages so you simple don't want to implement it in all of them.
Thankfully, the indexes and packages download is shared in libapt.

On debdelta itself: I have already commented on APT's devel-list 'deity'
in a thread from another student what i think about debdelta [0]:

>> etc.. Also they had mentioned about the official adoption of debdeltas
>> for Debian.
>
> That is another interesting thing. The problem is currently that a download
> method doesn't get to know which version of the package is currently
> installed (if any) which is needed as far as i understand it to repack
> a package to apply the debdiff to… but yeah, nothing which would be
> impossible to solve i guess.

In the meantime i have also found the bugreport for it: #498778

I am not sure if this fits into gsoc timeframe that well.
Properly depends heavily on the proposal details, so i would suggest
to put debdelta maintainers into the loop if you (or anyone else)
wants to persuade the idea and have a look at the old zsnyc idea [1]
and learn from their fail…


Best regards

David Kalnischkies
(who thought he had sent this mail already two days earlier)

[0] http://lists.debian.org/deity/2011/02/msg00032.html
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/apt-sync