One week in Paris

(I can't help myself, the title sounds like a good remake of bad stuff - I mean, the remake is bad, but double bad is good, isn't it?)

I am back. After my sheeva and then my kindle returned back to me, I returned home, too. Last week was one of the craziest in my life: You are more or less alone in a big city, hundreds of people passing by and you understand nobody. The only language I can really speak is German, but the masochist in me accepts invitations to America where my rusty English allows me to survive, but how he could accept an invitation to Paris in the knowledge that I don't speak a single word of French?!? I learned two words: 'Bonjour' (hello) and 'Sortie' (exit) in this week. As you can see, I am not a fast learner…

Anyway, it's properly more interesting what I did in Paris: Stefano happens to be working for one of the universities of Paris and in this function for IRILL on mancoosi. In a nutshell: Defining and organizing dependency solving battles by defining a protocol all solvers have to understand and what the response should be.

The week was therefore dedicated to working out a way for APT to talk to external solvers, so that we can use the battle survivors as external solvers for (maybe) better solutions. I will write a bit more detailed how this works (or not) after finishing it in a second stay in May, but so far we have an EDSP which defines an intermediate scenario format which is near to CUDF, but doesn't rewrite versionnumbers and alike as this is internal business a solver doesn't need to do to work with APT. So in practice the cudf solvers will most likely use a common preprocessor on this scenario and be happy. A common postprocessor will then reformat the cudf response to a diff style answer which will be passed to APT which reacts on it and does his "magic".

EDSP is currently an early draft and the implementation in APT more or less half-way finished while EDSP<->CUDF translator is promising, too. All in all we will most likely see something soon in May modulo that it will need an ABI-break in APT which needs a lot of time to be allowed in unstable most of the time.

Time will tell, so far at least from the water-level observation one-man-team here. 😉