17.12.2008: farewell, adept

Farewell, Adept

I am quite sad to announce that I am discontinuing Adept development for good. Since Kubuntu will be changing its default manager to KPackageKit (I wish everyone involved good luck), I have no further motivation to work on Adept at all. I have mostly done the 3.0 overhaul since Jonathan Riddell is my friend, and I like to make my friends happy. However, since this is no longer a factor, and my time is likely better invested elsewhere, I am giving up altogether.

Of course, if anyone steps up for maintainership, I will happily delegate Adept to them. It is in a relatively good shape these days, I hope. I will keep the source (darcs) repositories around as long as reasonably possible. If you are interested in taking over, even despite the Adept userbase declining sharply in near future, please drop me a mail. With Adept goes also libept, a more general-purpose library for working with APT. I will be around when people need me to fix it, but won’t add anything on my own. I am not even sure what is Enrico’s status on libept, but probably just consider libept as good as orphaned, too.

On a more personal note, this closes a long (very long) chapter in my free software life. I’d like to thank everyone involved with it, there have been many of you. Moreover, this apparently cuts the few remaining ties I had to KDE development community… I will miss you.

…well, maybe one of those days…

UPDATE: No, this does not mean I am no longer friends with Jonathan. I don’t know why, but already two people managed to read it that way. To put it in hopefully less ambiguous words: The fact that Jonathan is my friend is no longer a factor just because he does not need Adept anymore. … Hope that helps.

16.10.2008: adept 3.0 beta 4

Adept 3.0 Beta 4

I have released fourth beta of Adept today. For the unaware, Adept is an APT front-end for KDE: it lets you install, remove, upgrade software and such your Debian and Kubuntu boxes (and maybe on some other Debian derivatives, too).

Changes since Beta 2

Since I have done beta 3 somewhat in a hurry, I have regressed the installer component badly — to point of complete unusability. However un-sound software engineering practice, the deep freeze for Kubuntu Intrepid hits today, so I have released beta 4 in rapid succession. Other than the regression fix, I have mostly reworked the paging implementation in the installer — however, the report of complete installer rewrite (hi Jonathan) is somewhat exaggerated. Sadly, the KPageWidget we have been using before turns out to be completely unsuitable for the job, so a quick rewrite probably fixed more issues than it caused (and this seems to be confirmed by early testing feedback).

Moreover, this beta got a bunch of improvements to the search, including package name hits, a set of cosmetic improvements (button icons, nicer sidebar, etc.) and a button to run software-properties-kde from the Sources tab (works on Intrepid, but sadly breaks on Debian for now… will fix later. Need time, need sleep.)

Where to get

I have prepared binary packages. These should be now part of Debian Sid (unstable) and also of Kubuntu Intrepid. You should be able to get the new version from your distribution:

apt-get install adept

Again, as with beta 2, there is no Hardy backport, since my time is tight. If anyone is willing to do a backport please drop me a note: I will gladly publish installation instructions.

Heroes of Beta 4

• Jonathan Thomas (JontheEchidna) — quite a bit of stuff (and bug sorting, arr!)
• Jonathan Riddell — another bunch of bits
• Harald Sitter (apachelogger) — improved icon choices
• Michael Casadevall — for manpage, which accidentally didn’t get included in the package, only in the source — I’ll try to remember to fix that for beta 5

Jobs for Beta 5, RC and Final

Mostly just testing and reporting bugs. I currently plan a beta 5 with a few fixes that have started accumulating since beta 4 already (mostly one-liner fixes with minimal risk of regressions). After that, an RC is in order and a final release (finally…).

Notifier is not included. Kubuntu has an independent sort of notifier now, I believe. Maybe I’ll find time to reconcile it in 3.1 or so.

Moreover, I assume that a beta 4 or a very minorly patched beta 4 will become part of Kubuntu Intrepid — there should be no major roadblocks left, so I hope everything will bode well for Intrepid. I assume that whatever becomes 3.0 final will be eventually included in Intrepid updates. And then, plans should be set forth for 3.1…

Known issues

The about dialog still says beta 2. Bummer. Please try to note in your reports that this is actually a beta 4 that you are using. I’ll make sure beta 5 fixes that — but it might be another week till then, or so. The Intrepid version should have that fixed, thanks to Jonathan Thomas (again).