On Debian and Fedora experiences

[Panu Matilainen]

On Mon, 2006-12-04 at 05:04 -0600, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-12-03 at 21:13 +0200, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> > FWIW older versions of aptitude do work with apt-rpm, eg
> > eg http://www.haxxed.com/rpms/aptitude-0.3.3-1.src.rpm
> 
> Heh. I was just working on resurrecting aptitude for FC6, as I wanted to
> get my systems cleaned up and aptitude is great for spotting package
> cruft. Aptitude used to work beautifully, but ever since the apt in
> extras moved to the "lorg" fork, it has broken horribly. Both 0.3.3 and
> 0.4.1 seem broke in the same way. API changes? I've been able to hack
> the hell out of it to get it to compile, but it is incredibly unstable.

Oh, I wasn't aware of it being that unstable (I don't use aptitude
myself, as you might have guessed by now :)

The API hasn't really changed much in lorg versions, some minor details
here and there but nothing that a rebuild shouldn't fix. But apparently
not so. Part of the reason.. well, at least Synaptic circumvents
libapt-pkg just about every chance it gets, maybe Aptitude does that to
some extent as well (Synaptic needed some love because of that). Or
there has been some unintentional breakage - it's entirely possible
aptitude uses libapt-pkg in ways neither apt itself or synaptic does so
it's been uncaught by those.

> My C++-fu is too weak to fix it.
> 
> For one, this is probably horribly wrong but it makes gcc 4.1 happy:
> 
> --- aptitude-0.4.1.orig/src/generic/apt/aptitude_resolver_universe.h
> 2005-12-
> 09 12:23:25.000000000 -0600
> +++ aptitude-0.4.1.patched/src/generic/apt/aptitude_resolver_universe.h
> 2006-06-
> 07 04:08:38.000000000 -0500
> @@ -292,7 +292,7 @@
>    /** \brief Generate an invalid dependency object.
>     */
>    aptitude_resolver_dep()
> -    :cache(0), prv()
> +    :cache(0), prv(prv)
>    {
>    }

That's something one of the altlinux apt patch fixes (by providing a
default constructor for pkgCache::PrvIterator)

> 
> If anyone wants to mess with it:
> 
> http://www.haxxed.com/rpms/aptitude-0.4.1-0.1.src.rpm
> http://www.haxxed.com/rpms/aptitude-0.4.1-0.fc6.3.x86_64.rpm
> http://www.haxxed.com/rpms/aptitude-0.4.1-0.fc6.3.i386.rpm
> 
> I started taking a whack at updating to 0.4.4 (which seems to already be
> gcc 4.x clean) but haven't got it to compile yet.

You're welcome to take the aptitude issues to apt-rpm mailing list,
while I personally don't use it I know there are others interested in
it, and I'm willing to help where I can.

> 
> > AltLinux has a newer aptitude with their apt-rpm but it requires a 
> > one-liner patch that's not yet in upstream apt-rpm: 
> > ftp://ftp.altlinux.ru/pub/distributions/ALTLinux/Sisyphus/i586/SRPMS.classic/aptitude-0.4.1-alt1.1.src.rpm
> 
> Hmmm. I originally snagged ALTLinux's patch to 0.3.3 and mangled it to
> apply to 0.4.1. They appear to have now forked aptitude. Maybe it works
> better, I'll have to try it later.

They also have pretty much forked apt-rpm as well :) There's some pretty
interesting stuff in there, at least some of it will eventually make it
to the lorg releases as well.

	- Panu -