Just FYI,
this is the response I got from swim's author. There's the URL I didn't
have in my last mail ...
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog >> 0C4CABF1 >> http://prope.insa-lyon.fr/~rhertzog/
--- Begin Message ---
On Wed, 19 May 1999, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Le Wed, May 19, 1999 at 05:24:08AM -0700, Aaron Van Couwenberghe écrivait:
> > constructive feedback and ideas is encouraged to respond, but negative
> > responses will be ignored. Whether or not the community approves of this,
> > I will pursue it, and let the chips fall where they may.
>
> And what about swim ? It's a dpkg-compatible package manager. I didn't
> take a look to its sources but maybe you could simply improve swim if
> it's well written.
>
> I don't have an URL right now, but the author is reading this list and he
> may supply additional informations.
You can download swim from http://the.netpedia.net/the-download.html
This program is written in Perl. Originally, both dpkg and rpm were
written in Perl. Swim can run without dpkg by using ar from gcc; it uses
the Berkeley DB to create databases. These databases could run
independently of status, available and info/*, but my approach has been to
allow both of the best worlds - text databases and binary databases. So,
on a Debian system it uses dpkg, apt, the binary databases and provides
powerful command-line options (which in a sense are OO because of all the
writing they save you :*}).
In /usr/doc/apt/cache.html/ch4.html the possibility of using cache to
speed up dpkg is mentioned. I was actually thinking of modifying dpkg to
use swim's databases to speed things up. It will be interesting to see
what happens now that Ben Collins mentioned a formal plan to create a new
dpkg. Ofcourse, this project may want to use my program as a prototype
because I would imagine there is a need for some sort of hash database.
Ofcourse, a lot of development time would be saved if Perl, not C/C++ was
used.
Give swim a try, I've added a history for swim's shell and search
capabilities. Swim allows experienced users, people who can RTFM, or
power-users from the RPM sect to manage and make decisions about packages
more effeciently from the command-line. I've found it extremely useful.
Eventually, I would like to add the capability to manage archives all from
databases - the beginnings of this are already apparent.
I hope you are using a version of DB_File compiled for db2 not the buggy
db 1.85. You can examine the databases using db_dump to view their
structure. In the sources I wrote a little text explaining the structure.
Make sure you have libterm-readline-gnu-perl | libterm-readline-perl-perl
installed so that --stdin works properly. Please send me feedback!
Jonathan
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