Adept 3.0 Alpha 6
Hi, it’s that time again: new alpha version of Adept hits the block. For the unaware, Adept is an APT front-end for KDE. You can do all the cool stuff with it that the other kids can’t. Join the fun!
New features since Alpha 5
(the list is a little less staggering than the last time, sorry about that, but it’s only been a week)
- Tags are back! Enhance your searches with tags. Very cloudy, very buzzword-compliant, so very web two-oh. It actually works, too! (No irony intended. Maybe…)
- Status-based filtering,
- improved search in installer,
- much better error handling for dpkg and download errors,
- lost icons are back and a load of other bugfixes.
Where to get
I have again prepared binary packages, this time even more of them (a Hardy backport is included). Traditionally, in Debian, you can install alpha 6 from experimental:
apt-get install -t experimental adept
The sources.list goes:
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
and finally, on Kubuntu Hardy, the lines are (BUT: read below!)
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mornfall/ubuntu hardy main
Big fat warning: Due to somewhat unexpected difficulties, Adept requires newer APT than available in Hardy. This means, adding the above sources.list lines will upgrade your apt to a version from Intrepid, that’s also completely untested on anything resembling a Hardy installation. Be wary. Moreover, installing Adept means means KDE 4.1 for Hardy users. (This does not apply to Intrepid users, they are already on the cutting edge and no extra dangers lie this way.)
(For all Kubuntu users, there are more instructions to be found on https://launchpad.net/~mornfall/+archive.)
Heroes of Alpha 6
I hereby nominate the “Heroes of Alpha 6”, for their deeds that helped Adept move forward:
- Yuriy Kozlov, for early pre-release testing and numerous patch contributions throughout the 3.0 alpha series
- Jonathan Thomas (JontheEchidna), for discovering two bugs:
- failed downloads resulted in a cryptic internal errors
- an installer crash when using the search
- Samuel James Sarette (lunarcloud), for discovering that you could start apply changes twice in a row, by switching back to changes and hitting apply again (not surprisingly screwing up Adept)
- and finally, Jonathan Riddell, as there’d be no 3.0 alpha series without him…
(And a totally flirtless wink towards Blauzahl, who somehow inspired me to actually do some bugzilla sorting…)
And now, it’s easy to join the ranks of these heroes — just test the new alpha version and find bugs. Immortality won’t escape your grasp. Also, please don’t forget to read the next section.
Jobs for Alpha 6
Sorting through Launchpad for bugs that have been fixed in alpha 6 (compared to 2.1) would be really awesome. It is a big list and many of them are likely to need testing. (I can take care of that for the KDE bugzilla, but launchpad is a task just too daunting for me and my time possibilities, so help would be very much appreciated).
Notifier is still not included. The components to test are (if you have sudo, kdesu for the rest):
sudo adept
sudo adept installer
sudo adept updater
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.
Known Issues
- Sometimes, it seems that the installer search manages to break the layout. Change the search text and try again, it might fix itself. If you find a way to reproduce, please let me know!
- The installer search is still a little wonky at times (and maybe slow, dunno). And when there are no results, it keeps whatever groups there were before, they are just all empty. Oops.
- Icons fail to load on Kubuntu Hardy.
- Search seems to crash Adept just after installation on Hardy (could be related to xapian database update). Starting it again seems to help though. UPDATE: this does happen on other distributions as well. You run into the problem if you don’t have apt-xapian-index installed, you install it together with adept and then run adept right away. Then you get a crash on first search. Just restart adept and all should work just fine.
- UPDATE: When recovery fails, Adept will crash instead of reporting the error and closing gracefully. Run dpkg —configure -a.
- UPDATE: Don’t run adept through kdesudo on Kubuntu. It seems to cause mysterious issues with dpkg (and especially hal upgrades). No insight so far as to what is the problem.