Six impossible things » firstpost

State of the Aptitude

Obey Arthur Liu — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 21:01:26 +0000

I promised to post some updates about how the Aptitude project would be going so here it is.

Here’s what aptitude-gtk currently looks like :

Well, nothing very special right now. It’s really only a testing interface. The final GUI will probably be different. Now you may be interested by what’s going on behind it ?

Where to start ?

Aptitude is written in C++ with varying dosages of OO coding depending on the age of the code .

For the most part, the code is neat, clean and easy to understand. Sometimes, it’s overengineered: the code that implements the progress status of packages downloads and actions is exhaustive enough to cover the setup phases of a hydraulic dam, although sometimes you can still see progress bars mysteriously going backwards. Sometimes, Daniel Burrows will be happy to provide you with complimentary barf bags while explaining some ungodly oddities that have existed for years because it’s easier to remember the ritual dances to do than to make stuff behave logically.

Currently Aptitude-gtk is able to execute the libapt-pkg initialization phase, load up repository lists and update lists (think “aptitude update”). The next big task will be to load up the installed packages list and display it. It involves quite a lot of code because of all the things that connect to it : incremental package searches, sorts, filters and so on.

It’s been very interesting so far.

By the way, the minesweeper feature is already implemented, courtesy of gnomine

Coding somewhere (1)

Obey Arthur Liu — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:53:50 +0000

Coding and posting on a bullet train, while reading documentation on the net through a 3G wireless connection.

On the laptop is a proof of concept Aptitude GTK+ demonstration.

From the mysterious future : Google Summer of Code

Obey Arthur Liu — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:21:54 +0000

Hi everybody,

I’m starting to work on my Google Summer of Code 2008 project for Debian.

My project is basically to make a graphical interface for Aptitude. The official title is “Usability improvements and GTK+ GUI for Aptitude” and here is the official abstract :

I will create a GTK+ GUI for Aptitude that will work alongside improved current ncurses and command-line interfaces. This will offer an alternative to Synaptic with an interface design geared toward usability and advanced functionality.

You may find some info about me, Obey Arthur Liu, here. I will be working with Daniel Burrows, the creator of Aptitude.

I’ll try to keep this blog updated about what I’ll be doing.