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 》

This week, a few hours after Lenovo announced the X240, I bought an X230. Normally, the X230 model I bought comes with a Core i5-3320M CPU, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD. My model was a special set including a second 4GB RAM stick and a 128 GB mSATA Plextor SSD. It came without Windows; and the ThinkVantage button is black instead of blue and has no label. I put a fresh installation of unstable on it and tweaked it to save more power when on battery (enabled RC6++, and enabled autosuspend and other powertop suggestions with a script in /etc/pm/power. ... 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 》

Writing recursive descent parsers is easy, especially in Python (just like everything is easy in Python). But Python defines a low limit on the number of recursive calls that can be made, and recursive descent parsers are prone to exceed this limit. We should thus write our parser without real recursion. Fortunately, Python offers us a way out: Coroutines, introduced in Python 2.5 as per PEP 342. Using coroutines and a simple trampoline function, we can convert every mutually recursive set of functions into a set of coroutines that require constant stack space. ... 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 》

In the past days, I looked at various memory allocators in a quest to improve performance in my multi-threaded test cases of a reference counting language runtime / object allocator (a fun project). It turns out the glibc’s memory allocator is relatively slow, especially if you do loops that create one element and destroy one element at the same time (for example, map() on a list you no longer use after you passed it to map). ... Read more 》

One thing I thought about today is reference counting in combination with tail calls. Imagine a function like this: function f(x) { return g(x+1); } Now consider that x is a reference counted object and that x + 1 creates a new object. The call to g(x + 1) shall be in tail call position. In most reference counted languages, the reference to an argument is owned by the caller. That is, f() owns the reference to x + 1. ... Read more 》

In the language introduced yesterday, mutable parameters play the important role of representing the side effects of actions in the type system and thus ensure referential transparency. One of the questions currently unaddressed is how to handle currying in the presence of mutable parameters. In order to visualise this problem, consider a function printLn(mutable IO, String line) If we bind the the first parameter, what should be the type of the function, and especially important how do we get back the mutable parameter? ... Read more 》

Just for you, and this time in the Pythonesque rendering. module main: import std (range) import std.io (printf, IO) # print the Fahrenheit-Celcius table for fahr = 0, 20, ..., 300 function main(mutable IO io): Int lower = 0 # lower bound Int upper = 300 # upper bound Int step = 20 # step for Int fahr in range(lower, upper, step): Double celcius = 5 * (fahr - 32) / 9 std. ... Read more 》