Development and pending features

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

Hey Anders,

First, let me tell you that this is a very nice list of features.  It'll take me
some time to get through all of them, but I will get through them.  Please
ping me on the IRC if you have a preference on which should have my
attention first, as usual.

Also, as we quickly talked about today, I'd like to reduce the turnaround
between implementation and integration.  Let's try to have a brainstorm
tomorrow about this.

Meanwhile, some quick overview to get us going:

(...)
> Thought I'd try to summarize what the bugs and branches have listed over
> there.  So here goes what I think would be some nice features for future
> Smart versions:
>
>
> Platform support
>
> * bugfixes
> - the patch for file descriptors, to work on Mac OS X (old patch from
> MacPorts)

Isn't this one already fixed in trunk?

> - add patch for rpm.archscore, to work with older RPM versions: 4.4.7 and
> 5.0.0

This would be nice.  We just have to do it in a way that doesn't break
the arch support when it is available.

> * plugins
> - add yumchannelsync and zyppchannelsync plugins, in addition to
> aptchannelsync
>  yumchannelsync is for Fedora usage, and zyppchannelsync is for openSUSE
> usage

Nice!

> * fink
> - add support for "darwin-i386" deb packages, in addition to "i386" (linux2)
> - add support for "fink-virtual-pkgs", system requirements for the Fink debs

Nice too!

> * slack
> - add support for .tbz (bzip2) and .tlz (lzma) packages, in addition to .tgz
> - add features: requires/conflicts relations, checksums, compressed metadata

Sweet.  It's cool to see this being updated.  I haven't managed to test the
slackware support myself for quite a while.


> New Smart features
>
> * reference
> - improves the existing parsing of reference URLs, to add more channel
> support
>  adds a new "Reference" tab to the GUI interface, for viewing the
> information

Sounds good in theory, even though I'm not sure about the new tab.
Isn't the General tab adequate for this?

> * changelog
> - reads changelog from rpm database or files, mandriva hdlists or rpm
> metadata
>  adds a new "Changelog" tab to the GUI interface, for viewing the
> information

That's a great one!

> * groups
> - reads group (virtual package) information from yum comps.xml and yast
> patterns
>  not the same as the existing smart groups, which come from packages (e.g.
> rpm)

That's interesting, as we discussed a few times.  It may require some
attention during integration to actually be really useful.

> * errata
> - reads update errata information from external data, and adds to package
> info
>  information available: type, date, summary, description, reference URLs
> (CVE)

The patches I've seen look great.  We just need to extend the support to
be covered by the C module, and implement some testing.

> Suggested features
(...)

A nice set!  Let's have a look at these once we get through the most

(...)
> Thoughts ?

Keep up the great work!  Let's take some time to discuss these
features tomorrow.  I'll take at least one of them for a full
round early tomorrow.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net