aptitude 0.4.10 released

I've just released version 0.4.10 of aptitude, a terminal and command-line package management tool for Debian. This release has many user-visible changes (see the changelog below). It also fixes an annoying and much-reported segfault.

The Debian packages of this version are built against the new version of cwidget, which is sitting in NEW, but if you're impatient you can compile it by hand by dropping the versioned dependency. The dependency is there to ensure that we don't get dependency skew across architectures (aptitude depending on libcwidget0 on some archs and libcwidget1 on others) and doesn't represent an actual build requirement of aptitude.

[12/15/2007] Version 0.4.10 Oscillating Reindeer
New features:
In command-line mode, if the resolver fails to produce a solution for whatever reason, then instead of aborting the program entirely aptitude will now display a prompt at which you can fix the dependency problems by hand. Enter r at this prompt to try to automatically fix dependencies again.

safe-upgrade will now install new packages to fulfill dependences (but it will never remove packages, downgrade packages, or install a version that's not the default). The option --no-new-installs will disable this behavior.
Updates and commands that install, remove, or upgrade packages will now display a brief summary of what changed. For instance:
There are now 64 updates [+10], 3 new [+1].
Unfortunately, this change requires reading the cache after an update is complete. Passing -q will disable this behavior, but also make the update progress bar less attractive. More work on resolving this tension between features and performance remains to be done.
Add an option --allow-untrusted to override trust warnings. (Closes: bug #452201, bug #452541)

Recommended packages are now hidden if quiet mode is enabled. (Closes: bug #452202)

The options Aptitude::ProblemResolver::Trace-File and Aptitude::ProblemResolver::Trace-Directory allow you to generate a minimal cut of the cache that allows a problem resolver run to be reproduced. The eventual aim is both to simplify bug reporting and to generate a corpus of automatic test cases for the resolver (although more work needs to be done to accomplish the latter).
When run in command-line mode, instead of displaying many separate and sometimes duplicative groups of packages (e.g.: installed, auto-installed, auto-installed in a light cream sauce, etc), aptitude displays packages in a few exclusive categories and uses tags (like the existing purge tag) to provide more state information. For instance:
$ aptitude -s install wesnoth
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  wesnoth wesnoth-data{a} wesnoth-music{a}
$ aptitude -s remove freeciv-data
    (... dependency resolution ...)
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  freeciv-client-gtk{a} freeciv-data freeciv-server{a} ggzcore-bin{u}
  libggz-gtk1{u} libggz2{u} libggzcore9{u} libggzdmod6{u} libggzmod4{u}
Here {a} indicates that a package was automatically installed or removed, and {u} indicates that a package is being removed because it is unused. Hopefully this will be less confusing than the old format.
Bug fixes:

Crashes and serious errors:

Track down and fix a SEGV triggered on the first action after a cache reload (sometimes). There are multiple bugs where this might have been the root cause, but it's confirmed that it was the cause of at least bug #454695, bug #454700, bug #455349, and bug #453362. Bug bug #455865 is almost certainly the same issue, and bug bug #352278 may be another manifestation of it.

If StepLimit is set to 0, refuse to solve dependencies instead of going into an infinite loop. (Closes: bug #451311)

Minor bugs:

Return a failing exit code after jumping from the command-line to visual mode if the last install run failed. (Closes: bug #282408)

Return a failing exit code from aptitude update if any download fails. (Closes: bug #233129)

Cosmetic and UI bugs:

In addition to Enter, Space will now activate checkboxes and radio buttons. (Closes: bug #451765)

Abort the program if we get EOF at the resolver prompt instead of claiming the resolver failed.

Command-line searches will now only print each result once. (Closes: bug #450798)

Documentation bugs:

The options menu documentation now minimally describes the new configuration interface.

The documentation of the configuration file options has been placed back in alphabetic order after apparently suffering bitrot over the years.

Corrected the documented default of Parse-Description-Bullets to match reality.

The manpages for aptitude-create-state-bundle and aptitude-run-state-bundle are now generated using DocBook, which should produce higher-quality and more consistent typesetting, as well as making the manpages more maintainable and allowing translators to easily produce localized versions of the manpages.

Internal changes:

Removed some unit tests that really tested cwidget.

Translation updates:

French (Christian Perrier)