06.08.2008: adept 3.0 alpha 6

Adept 3.0 Alpha 6

Hi, it’s that time again: new alpha version of Adept hits the block. For the unaware, Adept is an APT front-end for KDE. You can do all the cool stuff with it that the other kids can’t. Join the fun!

New features since Alpha 5

(the list is a little less staggering than the last time, sorry about that, but it’s only been a week)

• Tags are back! Enhance your searches with tags. Very cloudy, very buzzword-compliant, so very web two-oh. It actually works, too! (No irony intended. Maybe…)
• Status-based filtering,
• improved search in installer,
• much better error handling for dpkg and download errors,
• lost icons are back and a load of other bugfixes.

Where to get

I have again prepared binary packages, this time even more of them (a Hardy backport is included). Traditionally, in Debian, you can install alpha 6 from experimental:

apt-get install -t experimental adept

The sources.list goes:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main

If you are on Kubuntu Intrepid, the line is:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mornfall/ubuntu intrepid main

and finally, on Kubuntu Hardy, the lines are (BUT: read below!)

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mornfall/ubuntu hardy main

Big fat warning: Due to somewhat unexpected difficulties, Adept requires newer APT than available in Hardy. This means, adding the above sources.list lines will upgrade your apt to a version from Intrepid, that’s also completely untested on anything resembling a Hardy installation. Be wary. Moreover, installing Adept means means KDE 4.1 for Hardy users. (This does not apply to Intrepid users, they are already on the cutting edge and no extra dangers lie this way.)

(For all Kubuntu users, there are more instructions to be found on https://launchpad.net/~mornfall/+archive.)

Heroes of Alpha 6

I hereby nominate the “Heroes of Alpha 6”, for their deeds that helped Adept move forward:

• Yuriy Kozlov, for early pre-release testing and numerous patch contributions throughout the 3.0 alpha series
• Jonathan Thomas (JontheEchidna), for discovering two bugs:
  • failed downloads resulted in a cryptic internal errors
  • an installer crash when using the search
• Samuel James Sarette (lunarcloud), for discovering that you could start apply changes twice in a row, by switching back to changes and hitting apply again (not surprisingly screwing up Adept)
• and finally, Jonathan Riddell, as there’d be no 3.0 alpha series without him…

(And a totally flirtless wink towards Blauzahl, who somehow inspired me to actually do some bugzilla sorting…)

And now, it’s easy to join the ranks of these heroes — just test the new alpha version and find bugs. Immortality won’t escape your grasp. Also, please don’t forget to read the next section.

Jobs for Alpha 6

Sorting through Launchpad for bugs that have been fixed in alpha 6 (compared to 2.1) would be really awesome. It is a big list and many of them are likely to need testing. (I can take care of that for the KDE bugzilla, but launchpad is a task just too daunting for me and my time possibilities, so help would be very much appreciated).

Notifier is still not included. The components to test are (if you have sudo, kdesu for the rest):

sudo adept
sudo adept installer
sudo adept updater

Please give a go to all of them, report rough edges, crashes and all that, either through IRC (mornfall at freenode, oftc) or mail me-at-mornfall-dot-net or use KDE Bugzilla.

Known Issues

• Sometimes, it seems that the installer search manages to break the layout. Change the search text and try again, it might fix itself. If you find a way to reproduce, please let me know!
• The installer search is still a little wonky at times (and maybe slow, dunno). And when there are no results, it keeps whatever groups there were before, they are just all empty. Oops.
• Icons fail to load on Kubuntu Hardy.
• Search seems to crash Adept just after installation on Hardy (could be related to xapian database update). Starting it again seems to help though. UPDATE: this does happen on other distributions as well. You run into the problem if you don’t have apt-xapian-index installed, you install it together with adept and then run adept right away. Then you get a crash on first search. Just restart adept and all should work just fine.
• UPDATE: When recovery fails, Adept will crash instead of reporting the error and closing gracefully. Run dpkg —configure -a.
• UPDATE: Don’t run adept through kdesudo on Kubuntu. It seems to cause mysterious issues with dpkg (and especially hal upgrades). No insight so far as to what is the problem.

posted 06.08.2008 1:57 tags: english debian kde tech

01.08.2008: adept 3.0 alpha 5

Adept 3.0 alpha 5

Short introduction: Adept is an APT frontend for KDE. You can use it to search for packages, install, uninstall, upgrade, all the usual things. It’s gone through a number of changes since 2.1, which has been the default package manager on Kubuntu for some time now.

What’s new since 2.1

• A KDE 4 application,
• mostly rewritten from scratch,
• more reliable already (in alpha) than 2.1,
• much better & more reliable handling of interactive installs (debconf, changed config files),
• fulltext search (powered by Xapian),
• all new user interface,
• faster and more responsive in about every respect.

Where to get

Since compilation is still not that trivial (well, it’s 3 packages to compile and install, really, and you have to get them with darcs), I have prepared binary packages for the two main “target distributions”. In Debian, you can install alpha 5 from experimental:

apt-get install -t experimental adept

The sources.list line is:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main

If you are on Kubuntu Intrepid, the line is

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mornfall/ubuntu intrepid main

(more instructions on https://launchpad.net/~mornfall/+archive)

What (and how) to test

All of the previous components (save for notifier, which is not included at all yet) have been merged into a single binary, that is adept. I have missed desktop files in this alpha (it might be a little on purpose too, as I’d like people to run the program from terminal to be able to check the debug output and possibly send it along with problem reports).

If you have sudo (Kubuntu-ers do, the rest can use kdesu or similar):

sudo adept
sudo adept installer
sudo adept updater

are the magic commands. Please give a go to all of them, report rough edges, crashes and all that, either through irc (mornfall at freenode, oftc) or mail me-at-mornfall-dot-net or use KDE Bugzilla to report bugs.

Missing features

I have one outstanding issue on “must have for 3.0”, that being filtering packages according to their state. There is also no actual way to browse through the 19k+ packages, but might have to give for 3.0. A “browsing” mode is likely for 3.1, although still could make it for 3.0 if I get my act together on that one. We’ll see how alpha testing goes, maybe I’ll have hands full of bugs to fix and won’t get anywhere on features…

Known Issues

• It seems that alpha5 does not play very well with the “autoremove” apt-get feature, I have that on todo, but please don’t blindly run autoremove after using alpha5.
• It seems to crash upon exit, with a “double free or corruption” error from glibc. I’ll deal with that.
• In alpha3, it used to keep running after you have closed its window. Please check that you don’t have stray adept process after exiting (I have not seen that happen in alpha5, but you never know) and if you do, please report.
• The search in installer is case-sensitive, exact substring match, against I think short description only. That needs to be addressed.

Reward

For the brave, fearless testers, I unfortunately cannot promise anything else than fuzzy feeling for doing a good thing… I won’t be at aKademy nor Debconf this year, so I can’t even promise beers. Maybe next time. ; - )

posted 01.08.2008 7:48 tags: english debian kde tech

darcs get http://repos.mornfall.net/ept-work
darcs get http://repos.mornfall.net/adept-3

cd adept-3
ln -s ../ept-work/ept ../ept-work/wibble .
mkdir _build
(cd _build && cmake .. -DINTERNAL_EPT=ON -DINTERNAL_WIBBLE=ON)
make -C _build

sudo sh -c "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`/_build/lib _build/tools/adept"

make -C _build check