Week 2: Family Business

That week was a bit slow. Partly do to the holidays involved (Ascension Thursday), which is actually an official holiday at least in my federal state (Hesse) of Germany, as that traditionally involves lots of family meetings with cake and BBQ. Partly as I had some time-consuming errants to run (producing a flyer is harder than predicted if what you get as a draft is in a MS Publisher format LibreOffice can thankfully open, but doesn't completely look like it was intended to… so I had to redo in a proper program) and partly because I had to wonder how people can be that incompetent: The family has a 6x urn grave place on the local graveyard. It has a massive, nice and by now old grave stone which you could have easily bought a car with more than 50 years ago. Anyway, a stonemason (the same business the stone was bought from all these years ago) was tasked with removing old names and placing a new one on it more than ONE YEAR ago. That job was initially supposed to be done 6 months ago in a few weeks time at most and the stone had to be removed from the grave so the mason could work on it properly. It ended up taking a lot longer than initially promised, but good work needs time, right? That's what I told grandma at least. So, on the plus side: This week it was finally done and the stone back, but that's the only "good" thing. Its a wonder there isn't a typo on the stone because the letters aren't placed in the positions it was ordered and a bunch of other major fuckups… with a grave & stone this big you have to seriously wonder how someone can believe it would be a good idea to place letters in a way that you can't even fit two names properly on the stone… which by itself would be bad enough, but of course it is not just some random name on the grave stone… in other words: get your shit together or you have to go shopping for your own grave pretty soon, god¹ damn!

Relation to GSoC? Talk to your 'costumer' if something isn't working the way it should – and if it takes longer make at least sure the result is worth it… but really, beside eating time it also hit the mood hard, which isn't the pretext for a productive week… so a bunch of small scale stuff rather than the one big thing I had hoped to get done early. So not really much of a user-visible change, just mails to bugs hinting of possible changes (#823534, #823625) related to handling of virtual packages involved in removing. A bunch of WIP on making EDSP support 'apt upgrade' and further refactoring to get closer to the 2-weeks-upcoming "export problem set" goal; still nothing to show of for general interest.

Also: Two days I spent on implementing new features for the acquisition of additional files by apt used by apt-file & appstream at the moment instead of the GSoC project as apt-file has the problem of needing to deal with two different locations for Contents files – that will eventually be solved on the archives side of things, but transitioning between locations seems like a thing apt should really support for more than just this case, which hasn't much to do with installation order planing, but at least the code had to ensure a certain order in index targets download – so I at least did some ordering code on these days… 😉

So, next week: Still getting apt to produce a textual representation of the problem the planner has to solve. The parts it shares with EDSP are easy of course (Dependencies, …), but there are just as obvious differences in other part: A dependency solver e.g. just cares about installed or not, while a package can in reality be in fifty shades of gray between installed and not installed all with potentially slightly different expectations on further processing.

Anyway, that is all going to make more sense with some code so lets see where we stand next week.

¹ There is a certain irony in using (originally) religious-flavoured swearing this close to big (christian) religious days – especially if you do it while talking about graveyards around Ascension day.