Adept not ready to be used by non-adept developers

[Juan Carlos Torres]

On Saturday 30 June 2007, Paul Dufresne wrote:
> I really hope we won't ship Kubuntu 7.10 with adept in the bad state it
> is now in Gutsy.

Gutsy is in alpha right now. Things break, almost daily. Of course, unless 
people are willing to help report these bugs, developers may not know about 
them and be able to fix them in time. You need to remember that 1) you are 
using alpha software and 2) the state of alpha software will not be the same 
as the released version.

> I just hit the wall again with adept-updater.
> Just accepted to update the system.
> At the beginning, it has found an error.
> At this moment, it seems to show a message dialog indicating that an
> error happened, with an ok button.
> While the window is open, it continue to update the system.
> A big problem, is that when you click Ok, it seems to directly quit the
> application without even removing
> the lock.

Maybe you can give more details? What was the error? What was the error 
message? We can't read minds, nor can we guess what happened. It would be 
extremely helpful if we knew even those two things.

> I hear you say, we know, just fill a bug report.
> Well, I would say that is not a bug, because the developers of Adept
> seems to not event have think about managing errors.
> On the web page of Adept: http://web.mornfall.net/adept.html we can read
> that only next big version, version 3,
> will handle errors.

You said "developers", but you have only seen what one man (the lead 
developer) said. He is not the only developer for Adept. If you haven't 
noticed, there were changes in Adept on Feisty. There is development going 
on. Perhaps you just haven't noticed.

"next big version, version 3."

Let me give you a hint about (most) software development. There are big, major 
versions, and there are minor versions. The minor versions come in between 
the major versions. Adept is currently in major version 2, minor version 1 = 
2.1. Then in between those, there are also small fixes here and there. So 
just because the next "big" version is version 3, it doesn't mean there will 
be no changes before that.

> And the worst, is that most users are aware of the situation, and knows
> very well how to fix the lock problem and use
> dpkg to continue.
> BTW: if you could remember me the magic command lines to fix this, it
> would be great!

The command is "sudo dpkg --configure -a".
You'd be happy to know that there is someone who's already making an that will 
try to resolve these kinds of errors, without the user having to resort to 
typing commands. He's hoping to release it by Gutsy.

> But it seems that nobody wish to tackle the task of fixing Adept, or ask
> to remove it from 7.10 and replace it by
> an other package manager.

I think that's a bit unfair. Everyone (well, almost everyone) working on 
Kubuntu are volunteers. We all work together, most in their free time, to 
help make Kubuntu a great distro. We may miss a few spots, but I assure you 
it's not because of lack of concern for user experience. What we do lack is 
manpower, coders, and bug reporters/triagers. We need and accept every bit of 
help we can get.

As for replacing it with another package manager, until a better KDE package 
manager for APT comes around, I'm afraid we're out of choices. Synaptic is 
not an option.