gdebi / python-apt backport

[Michael Vogt]

Hi John,

On Fri, Nov 25, 2005 at 07:51:16PM -0500, John Dong wrote:
> Users have expressed interest for a backport of the wonderful gdebi, which I
> would like to see also. It's the one missing link in easy software installs
> for Ubuntu.

Thanks for your interesst in backporting gdebi.  
 
> I noticed its recent upload into Dapper, and built a test package of
> it.

If you backport it now, please note that it has pretty bad error
reporting when it downloads the required dependencies. If a download
fails for some reason, it will only report "error". That's pretty
sucky but will be fixed soon. So it may be a idea to wait for the next
python-apt/gdebi upload.

> However, it doesn't install on Breezy because python-apt dependency versions
> could not be satisfied... So here's the thing:
> 
> (1) Does gdebi really need the latest version of python-apt?

gdebi needs three updated packages from dapper: gksu, python-apt and
python-vte. 

For gksu you can easily work around that by changing the call to
"gksudo -- " into a commandline that the version from breezy
understands. My advice would be to use bzr and branch from my
repository at http://people.ubuntu.com/~mvo/bzr/gdebi--main/ to make
it easy for you to maintain the required patch.

libvte/python-vte is required to make pass filedescriptor information
from libapt to gdebi. Without this patch the progressbar when
installing dependencies will not work.

python-apt is required as well, but it shouldn't break anything (but
please test it with update-manager and gnome-app-install first :). It
just adds some new classes and interfaces to bits that wheren't export
before. I need to rewrite one interface to better support error
handling during the dependency install (see above). 

> (2) Would packaging a backport of python-apt break compatibility with any
> existing packages? In theory, the situation should be safer with Python
> modules, but I don't want to take any chances... Looking at the apt-cache
> rdepends list, prominently update-* use this library.

See above, it's probably a good idea to make a test-repostiory
available for the people in the forums before pushing it into the
"offical" breezy-backports repository. 

It would also be nice if people would tell me about problems they have
with gdebi. If anything breaks or behaves strange I would like to know
about it. gdebi is pretty new and also I try to be very careful not to
break the apt cache but you never know.

Cheers,
 Michael

-- 
Linux is not The Answer. Yes is the answer. Linux is The Question. - Neo