I just started working on a replacement for APT written in Vala and called APT2 (I know, the name could be better). The main idea behind the project is to create a library for working with Debian repositories and packages, and on top of this library a few applications. This is different from APT because the project focuses on the library part, whereas APT is primarily focused on the application part. ... Read more 》

I forgot to write about this but I uploaded notify-osd to Debian some time ago which brings the passive notification bubbles known from Ubuntu. There are still some applications that do not behave correctly when using notify-osd. One example is giver which utilizes buttons on the notifications to accept or reject file transfers - As notify-osd is passive, it just displays a notification without the buttons. Using the notify plugin for Pidgin is also no good idea, as it now creates dialogs instead of displaying notifications, due to some (unneeded) buttons on the notification. ... Read more 》

The release of Python APT 0.7.92 is the first (pre-)release to introduce the new C++ bindings to create Python objects for almost every C++ object in the apt-pkg and apt-inst libraries. It is also the first version of python-apt which correctly deallocates its objects. It also introduces classes in apt_inst which are modelled after the ’tarfile’ module in Python. The new progress classes behave more like the ones in apt, which allows you to write even more perfect apt-get clones (if you want to). ... Read more 》

Let’s kill CDBS and help debhelper 7 gain world domination!

Overall, having time-based freezes is a good idea. But the chosen cycle is problematic, especially if one considers Ubuntu’s LTS release cycles. The problem is that if Debian releases a new version at approximately the same time as Ubuntu, there will not be much synchronization and Ubuntu will have newer program versions. Consider the releases of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (April 2008) and Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (February 2009). Whereas Ubuntu 8.04 provides GNOME 2. ... Read more 》

As I promised, I released python-apt 0.7.91 today. This version provides a new API, with real classes in apt_pkg, new names which conform to PEP 8 conventions, and it supports new language features such as the ‘with’ statement. Old code should still continue to work, if it does not and it is using only public interfaces, report a bug against python-apt or send an email. I can not guarantee that all the names will be kept like they are at the moment (it’s a pre-release), but there should not be many more changes needed. ... Read more 》

Python 3.1 is still in experimental, but python-apt already has a fully working Python 3 version. With the patch being available in the ‘jak’ branch, python-apt Bug#523645 can be closed soon. And this is not the only change. Memory usage has been decreased by 10MB by creating the Package() objects on the fly instead of pre-creating all 25000 ones. All classes which previously supported the has_key() method now support contains, which allows you to write ‘key in mapping’. ... Read more 》

So, I have started to port python-apt to Python 3. Most things work already, but there is one single problem. I can not access the attributes of the objects, only their methods. In Python 2.5, everything works perfectly. In Python 3.1, the same code produces an error. An example is apt_pkg.GetCache().Packages. I defined the slots tp_getattro and tp_methods. In Python 3.1, tp_getattro seems to be ignored. If you want to help, http://bzr. ... Read more 》

I have just uploaded a version of python-apt 0.7.10 to unstable ( my first upload of python-apt, all previous uploads were done by Michael Vogt). This release is mainly a bugfix release, but also brings new features like apt.package.Version.uri and apt.package.Version.fetch_binary().I also added a Breaks: debdelta (« 0.28~) because debdelta 0.27 is not working anymore since python-apt 0.7.9 and I expect that this problem will be fixed in 0.28, which could then use the new apt. ... Read more 》

With version 0.7.9 “change has come” to python-apt, and I will tell you now what the new stuff is about: 1. Introduction of the documentation As you may know, python-apt 0.7.8’s only documentation was available from the source code and to some parts from the docstrings. This changed in python-apt 0.7.9~exp2, when I introduced a complete documentation written in reStructuredText, and generated using Sphinx. This documentation has even improved in the final 0. ... Read more 》