Re: RFS: APT-Fu - source building tool for APT

[Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net>]

Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> wrote:
> Eric Wong wrote:
> > Hello, I wrote a new source-building tool for APT and am looking for
> > somebody to sponsor it.  
> > 
> > Here's an excerpt I wrote for the README file:
> > 
> >     Why APT-Fu?  Why not use an existing source-building tool in Debian?
> 
> I think it's a bad idea to add yet another duplicate tool to debian when
> you could easily add every listed feature to apt-src and perhaps help
> turn it into something really useful.

So at least you like some of the features in this, yes? :)

Having apt-src support the features apt-fu does now would require
additions to libapt-pkg-perl (not easy to me, yet; maybe you or Brendan
O'Dea could do it easily).  The functionality of `apt-cache policy` is
very important to apt-fu, so it's not an easy modification to apt-src,
only.  Running `apt-cache policy` from apt-src would be redundant and
any speed advantage apt-src has over apt-fu through the libapt-pkg cache
access would be lost.

The functionality of `apt-cache policy` is not just for Woody/Sarge
users, either.  Sid users with experimental sources in their
sources.list, but not wanting to default to them should find it useful.

For a long term solution, I agree that an improved libapt-pkg-perl,
together with merging apt-fu and apt-src together would be great idea.
But apt-fu is already has more features than either apt-build or apt-src
_today_, while maintaining compatibility with Woody.

Of course it works in Sid and Sarge, which is why I posted here.  Having
it in Sid will help people gain acceptance of it so they can use it
in Sarge or Woody if they wish.

My plan for the future is to always maintain a fully-featured version
that works with latest stable release (outside of Debian, as is the case
today with Woody being long frozen).  This is the only version I have
today.

In time, either I'll learn XS and see what changes I can make to
libapt-pkg-perl for Sid, or someone else will have added them.  Then
I'll work on merging apt-fu and apt-src.

But until then, apt-fu is still the most functional utility of its kind
I know of, albeit slower than I'd like.

Thanks for reading.

-- 
Eric Wong/normalperson