Re: Greetings

[Havoc Pennington <rhp@zirx.pair.com>]

On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Kirk Saranathan wrote:
> Hello, Jason.  My name is Kirk Saranathan and I'm one of the engineers
> at Corel working on the Corel Linux distribution.  I was given your
> contact info by Wichert Akkerman.  I'm hoping to get some info from you
> about the internals of apt so that I may modify (or create) a package
> management front-end to use apt.  I'm currently reading the source on
> the apt package and am still learning.  I read about a gnome frontend to
> apt but haven't been able to find anything thus far (except for kpackage
> which uses dpkg directly).  Could you point me in the right direction?
> 
> I hope we can work together to make debian packagement management easier
> for the average Linux user.
> 

Kirk,

I'm the author of the Gnome frontend; you can find out more at
http://www.debian.org/~hp/gnome-apt.html. I have a giant task-list on that
web page. :-) There is also a link to Wichert's UI design document, which
should be interesting for you.

Of course it's my hope that Corel will be interested in contributing to
gnome-apt rather than starting a new project, but if nothing else
gnome-apt should be a good source of examples on how to use the Apt
library. apt-get is the other major source of examples.

I would suggest checking Apt and gnome-apt out of CVS, so you have the
source code around to play with and learn from. Right now the Gnome
packages you need to compile gnome-apt are in a special staging area; but
they should be in the main unstable distribution in a matter of days. 

I'm happy to answer any questions you might have about Gnome or gnome-apt;
Jason is the expert on the apt-pkg library, though, so he is probably the
person to contact for that.

Thanks,
Havoc