Adept 3.0 alpha 5
Short introduction: Adept is an APT frontend for KDE. You can use it to search for packages, install, uninstall, upgrade, all the usual things. It’s gone through a number of changes since 2.1, which has been the default package manager on Kubuntu for some time now.
What’s new since 2.1
- A KDE 4 application,
- mostly rewritten from scratch,
- more reliable already (in alpha) than 2.1,
- much better & more reliable handling of interactive installs (debconf, changed config files),
- fulltext search (powered by Xapian),
- all new user interface,
- faster and more responsive in about every respect.
Where to get
Since compilation is still not that trivial (well, it’s 3 packages to compile and install, really, and you have to get them with darcs), I have prepared binary packages for the two main “target distributions”. In Debian, you can install alpha 5 from experimental:
apt-get install -t experimental adept
The sources.list line is:
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main
If you are on Kubuntu Intrepid, the line is
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mornfall/ubuntu intrepid main
(more instructions on https://launchpad.net/~mornfall/+archive)
What (and how) to test
All of the previous components (save for notifier, which is not included at all
yet) have been merged into a single binary, that is adept. I have missed
desktop files in this alpha (it might be a little on purpose too, as I’d like
people to run the program from terminal to be able to check the debug output
and possibly send it along with problem reports).
If you have sudo (Kubuntu-ers do, the rest can use kdesu or similar):
sudo adept
sudo adept installer
sudo adept updater
are the magic commands. Please give a go to all of them, report rough edges, crashes and all that, either through irc (mornfall at freenode, oftc) or mail me-at-mornfall-dot-net or use KDE Bugzilla to report bugs.
Missing features
I have one outstanding issue on “must have for 3.0”, that being filtering packages according to their state. There is also no actual way to browse through the 19k+ packages, but might have to give for 3.0. A “browsing” mode is likely for 3.1, although still could make it for 3.0 if I get my act together on that one. We’ll see how alpha testing goes, maybe I’ll have hands full of bugs to fix and won’t get anywhere on features…
Known Issues
- It seems that alpha5 does not play very well with the “autoremove” apt-get feature, I have that on todo, but please don’t blindly run autoremove after using alpha5.
- It seems to crash upon exit, with a “double free or corruption” error from glibc. I’ll deal with that.
- In alpha3, it used to keep running after you have closed its window. Please check that you don’t have stray adept process after exiting (I have not seen that happen in alpha5, but you never know) and if you do, please report.
- The search in installer is case-sensitive, exact substring match, against I think short description only. That needs to be addressed.
Reward
For the brave, fearless testers, I unfortunately cannot promise anything else than fuzzy feeling for doing a good thing… I won’t be at aKademy nor Debconf this year, so I can’t even promise beers. Maybe next time. ; - )