APT’s performance in applying the Pdiffs files, which are the diff format used for Packages, Sources, and other files in the archive has been slow. Improving performance for uncompressed files The reason for this is that our I/O is unbuffered, and we were reading one byte at a time in order to read lines. This changed on December 24, by adding read buffering for reading lines, vastly improving the performance of rred. ... Read more 》

Today I made an important change to the python-apt code: It is now native Python 3 code (but also works under Python 2). The previous versions all run 2to3 during the build process to create a Python 3 version. This is no longer needed, as the code is now identical. As part of that change, python-apt now only supports Python 2.7, Python 3.3, and newer. I’m using some features only present in 3. ... Read more 》

I released python-apt 0.9. This completely removes support for the old API from the code base (it was disabled for the entirety of 0.8 in Debian, and in Ubuntu since saucy). Highlights: * Cleanup: Complete removal of old-api support code * Bug fix: Various coverty bug fixes by Michael Vogt * Bug fix: Correctly handles multi-arch dependencies in apt.debfile, so packagekit and gdebi can now install local multi-arch packages correctly * Bug fix: A segmentation fault has been fixed. ... Read more 》

The script apt-show-versions is developed by another Debian Developer called Christoph Martin in Perl. Recently, it turned out that apt-show-versions is too slow for some users; so I decided to rewrite his program using APT’s C++ API. I expect this to be part of a future APT release, rendering the original apt-show-versions obsolete. The rewrite is sadly not 100% backwards compatible to the original version; as some option names had to be renamed due to our command-line parser not supporting option names like -nh, and some other options were dropped because they are hard to support (like –status-file and –lists-dir) with our command-line parsing. ... Read more 》

You can use a PBO solver to clean up your system from unneeded automatically installed packages. First of all, you convert the system state to PB, and add an optimization function telling it to remove as many automatically installed packages as possible. Then you run this thing through a solver (such as clasp, which seems the fastest solver for PBO instances in the Debian archive) and convert its output to human-readable package names. ... Read more 》

Debian packages commonly use or dependencies of the form “a | b” to mean that a or b should be installed, while preferring option a over b. In general, for resolving an or dependency, we will try all options from the left to the right, preferring the left-most option. We also prefer real packages over virtual ones. If one of the alternatives is already installed we use that. def solve_or(or): best_real = None best_virtual = None for dep in or: for target in dep: if target. ... Read more 》

Over the last years, I have developed a variety of metapackages for managing the package selections of the systems I administrate. The meta packages are organized like this: jak-standard Standard packages for all systems jak-desktop Standard packages for all desktop systems (GNOME 3 if possible, otherwise GNOME 2) jak-printing Print support jak-devel Development packages jak-machine-<X> The meta package defining the computer X Each computer has a jak-machine-X package installed. This package is marked as manually installed, all other packages are marked as automatically installed. ... Read more 》

Yesterday I released version 4 of dh-autoreconf, fixing two bugs, and introducing a new feature: Patching ltmain.sh to make -Wl,–as-needed work. For this new feature, run dh_autoreconf with the –as-needed option. dh_autoreconf will then patch all ltmain.sh equal to the system one (which should be all ltmain.sh files if libtoolize ran before or via dh_autoreconf). On clean, dh_autoreconf_clean reverses the patch again. So, if your package runs autoreconf, and patches ltmain. ... Read more 》

Yesterday was my 21st birthday, and I received all “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” novels, the five ones in one book, and the sixth one written by Eoin Colfer in another book. Needless to say, the first book weights more than an N900. I did not read them yet, so now is the perfect chance to do so. Yes, I did not know that 25th is towel day, sorry for that. ... Read more 》

The last two weeks, two new python-apt releases were made. 0.8.0~exp3 did not add much, but 0.8.0~exp4 added some new bindings for our friends at the mancoosi project. I also committed several fixes to the APT repository, but did not upload them yet. In #debian-devel, some people (including me and others on the Debian side; and sladen, sabdfl for the Ubuntu side) discussed the Ubuntu font license which is considered non-free by Debian, due to extreme naming restrictions in section 2 (unmodified versions must keep the name, slightly modified versions must keep the name and add something). ... Read more 》