Week 3: The not-so-big ubuntu diff

Wow, did a week already passed? Good god no, but as I will be more or less MIA for the next few days to do some young leader tasks let us finish week 3 here so I have more time in week 4. 🙂

Week 3 was short (haha) but some good stuff could be achieved and the todolist for this week was nearly emptied. Valid-Until is now (again) a supported header (after it was in a previous experimental iteration of APT) with documentation and configuration stuff, so we are a bit better protected against replay attacks, but as always it could be improved…

The rest is refactoring of code like moving out gpgv calling, using strptime instead of some self-made time parsing and a few bugfixes like the one hinted last week: Finding the right candidate for non-installed pseudo packages if the non-pseudo package is installed - both should have been the same candidate as long as no non-pseudo version is ranged higher…

Sounds all a bit unmotivated and boring - doesn't it? And it is 😉 At least compared to the biggest improvement for APT and the debian/ubuntu relation: Michael invested quite a bit of time to get longstanding diffs into sync again. Beside some code which is now disabled per default on debian (like apport stuff) without any further effect we also get a few cool things. An interesting little feature is it for example that APT switches (for the dpkg-commandline suggestion if your systemstate is broken dynamical) to "sudo dpkg …" if APT was called with sudo. Minor, but cool. More useful is that apt-get source now shows also from where the version control repository for this package is located if the Vcs-Headers are present. Again, minor but cool. 🙂

We will see what usage the bigger stuff like mirror-handling will get by the time it can be used. And other cool stuff just looks around the corner to be included next time for both…

Anyway, even if you only do a "few" things you can destroy everything: So the ~exp6 was closely followed by ~exp7 to fix a variable accessable problem (pkgCacheFile::Policy), but okay, enough for this week - some young leader tasks are calling - have a nice rest of week 3. 🙂