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Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
dselect is the venerable user interface to the Debian package
management system and archive. It's certainly one of the most
uniquely identifiable components of a Debian system.
However its age and the lack of love bestowed on it is really
starting to show compared to the various APT-based frontends that have
appeared recently.
I haven't used dselect in quite a while, myself. When installing my
last potato box, I think ... that should give you an idea of how long
ago that was!
I'm looking for somebody to take responsibilty for it, not just for
its buglist but for future development of it. I'm quite able to
maintain the status-quo myself, and keep away the worst of the bugs,
but I'm not going to be doing anything much to improve it. That's
where you come in.
Candidates should:
* love dselect -- it should be your frontend of choice.
You might even think APT is for newbies, and want dselect's own
FTP method restored to power. Alternatively, because I'm not sure
that person exists ;), you want to integrate dselect more closely
with APT than the current method allows.
* have a reasonable amount of free time and patience -- there's a
lot of bugs there, and from a development POV it needs a lot of
work.
* have a good understanding of C++ -- not to mention an ability to
stand on their head to understand iwj-C++.
* a reasonable understanding of C -- bits of dselect depend on the C
parts of dpkg, you'll need to be able to read those too.
* be able to work well with others -- dselect is not a separate
source package, and is a pre-dependency of dpkg. Therefore you'll
need to work well with myself, and the other members of the team.
So you're interested? Excellent!
I maintain dpkg in Arch these days, so the best way to contribute your
changes is simply to make them on your own branch so I can merge them
in. If you've never used it before, and Andrew Suffield's support of
it has put you off, no need to worry.
http://people.ubuntu.com/~scott/arch/Arch-For-Dpkg should teach you
everything you need.
You should also make sure you're on the debian-dpkg mailing list so
you get bug reports.
Oh, yes, and you should start going down those bug reports and making
a difference. dselect needs YOU!
Scott
- --
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen? Are you going round the twist?
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