Six impossible things

I’m going to the Google Europe Headquarters in Zerich, Switzerland, tomorrow (July 10th).

Google is inviting us Summer of Code students, which is really nice.

I should be there in the middle of the afternoon from Paris.

I’ll be wearing a Slashdot tshirt. Drop me a mail or a comment if you go too so we can meet!

New status update!

Here’s what Aptitude looks like:

(more screenshots after the break)

I’ve been exploring how the APT libraries work and how to interact with the aptitude back-end and here’s what it can do now:

• Update package lists
• Display package lists
• Basic package search
• Mark packages for install/remove/purge/keep/hold
• Display package actions for execution
• Display conflicts
• Display and navigate between package conflict solutions
• Apply them
• Execute package actions (ie. actually install stuff)

What’s missing:

• A real user interface
• Being reliable…
• Packages dependencies, pre-dependencies, etc.
• Hyperlinks between packages
• Advanced package search
• Tags support (tag clouds ?)
• Linking with interesting data sources like popcon
• A lot of interesting things

Basic functions of a package manager are already covered. We’re still at the APT API exploration phase although we’re almost done with it. I will soon start working on the final user interface and the real code design.

The current code is about 2000 lines of hastily hacked together C++ and XML. I’ll have to restart the coding with a more elaborate Object design. Something that will be easier to work with in the future.

The code is on http://dev.graffit.net/aptitude/trac. You can try to compile it and play with it. On the other hand I’m going to scrape most of the code soon for the restart so if you’re bored..

A walkthrough and more screenshots after the break.

Continue reading “State of the Aptitude (week 7)”