[4/18/2010]

Version 0.6.2

A costly proposition

• New features:

  • [all] Resolver tiers are dead, long live resolver costs.

    The resolver now supports a flexible system of multi-leveled costs, in place of the fairly rigid tiers of previous releases. The default behavior emulates how tiers worked, but the resolver can also be configured with custom cost vectors by setting Aptitude::ProblemResolver::SolutionCost to something like this:

    canceled-actions + 2*removals, ignored-recommends, installs
    

    That says to minimize the number of packages kept at their current version plus twice the number of removals (i.e., a removal counts for two keeps). Within that group, ties are broken by looking at the number of Recommends that were ignored, and within that group, ties are broken by looking at the number of new packages the resolver wants to install.

    In addition to custom cost vectors, resolver hints can be used to create completely custom costs.

    See the reference manual for full details.

    This is not optimized and I expect that pushing it to the limits will show off all sorts of exponential explosions. Have fun!

  • [cmdline] Implemented an "aptitude versions" command that I've been kicking around for a while, to display and search for individual package versions. Documented in the manpage, but here are some highlights:

  $ aptitude versions apt
  i   0.7.25.3                         unstable     500
  p   0.7.26~exp3                      experimental 1
  
  $ aptitude versions '^apt$ ?installed'
  Package apt
  i   0.7.25.3                         unstable     500
  
  $ aptitude versions xserver-xorg udev
  Package udev:
  i   151-2                                         100
  p   151-3                            unstable     500
  
  Package xserver-xorg:
  i A 1:7.5+3                                       100
  p A 1:7.5+5                          unstable     500
  
  $ aptitude versions --group-by=source-package '?name(aptitude)'
  Source package aptitude:
  i   aptitude 0.6.1.5-2                            100
  p   aptitude 0.6.1.5-3               unstable     500
  i   aptitude-dbg 0.6.1.5-2                        100
  p   aptitude-dbg 0.6.1.5-3           unstable     500
  i   aptitude-doc-cs 0.6.1.5-2                     100
  p   aptitude-doc-cs 0.6.1.5-3        unstable     500
  

  (... many more lines of output snipped ...)

• Crashes and serious errors:

  • [cmdline] Don't crash if the user sets a rejection at the internal command-line via package name and version rather than using the new pick-by-numbers UI. (Closes: bug #567242)

  • [cmdline] Don't crash if the user asks to see information about a removal.

  • [cmdline] Don't crash in aptitude changelog when the package given on the command-line doesn't have a valid version (Closes: bug #576318). Thinks to Dmitry Semyonov for the patch.

• Cosmetic and UI bugs:

  • [curses] Don't leave a download progress bar hanging around after downloading a changelog. (Closes: bug #566205)

• Internal changes:

  • [all] Replaced mktemp() with a custom function doing a similar thing (albeit with slightly better randomness). This eliminates the spurious linker warning I've been ignoring for five years: the linker has no way to know that I only use mktemp() to create names in a mode 0700 directory, which is about the only way to use it safely.

[4/22/2009]

Version 0.5.2

Ramparts of the Dawn

THIS IS AN UNSTABLE DEVELOPMENT RELEASE OF APTITUDE. DO NOT USE IT IF YOU NEED A STABLE PACKAGE MANAGER.

This release merges in the work that was done on the lenny branch of the program but not the post-lenny one (mostly translation work). It also includes major changes to the dependency solver.

• Known bugs:

  • [gtk] Ctrl-W should close a tab, but instead it crashes the program. Do not press Ctrl-W and you will be happier.

  • [gtk] When you reject or accept a resolver choice, the corresponding row in the solution might not update to reflect your change. If you switch to another solution and back, it will update correctly.

• New features:

  • [all] aptitude now uses liblog4cxx to provide diagnostic logging of much of the program.

  • [all] The aptitude dependency solver now supports a tiered search. Hopefully this will make dependency resolution more predictable and allow more meaningful configuration. In particular, removals are not attempted until all solutions involving only keeps, installs and upgrades are exhausted, and solutions involving versions that aren't the default candidate are deferred until removals are exhausted.

    See the user's manual for details.

    Closes: bug #514820, bug #514930, bug #524221, bug #473296

  • [gtk] The resolver tab has been completely overhauled. It now supports all the features of the backend dependency solver, and it has an interface that is much more suitable for a GTK+ program.

    

  • [gtk] The dpkg tab now attempts to detect when something is waiting for input, by keeping track of how long it's been since dpkg sent a status message. When the install process, appears to be waiting, the view details button is flashed to hopefully get the user's attention.

  • [gtk] The procedure for upgrading has been streamlined. aptitude computes an upgrade in the background automatically using the same algorithm that backs safe-upgrade. The user can either accept the solution or try to fix the remaining dependencies manually.

    

    

  • [cmdline] Added a new command-line option, --show-summary, to the why command-line action. This option causes aptitude to show a brief list of the first package in each dependency chain that would have been displayed. Dependency chains that contain Suggests are not displayed, so combining this option with -v will cause aptitude to display all the packages that require the target.

    Documentation for this feature is currently missing. The --show-summary option accepts an optional argument giving the summary mode:

    1. no-summary: don't show a summary.

    2. last-package: only show the last package in each chain; that is, either the manually installed package that requires the target package, or the package you selected from the command-line. This is the default if --show-summary is used with no argument. In future releases of aptitude this will be first-package, since that name makes a lot more sense.

    3. last-package-and-type: display the last package in each chain, along with an indication of the strength of the chain.

    4. all-packages: briefly display each chain of packages in its entirety.

    5. all-packages-with-dep-versions: briefly display each chain of packages in its entirety, along with the version constraint, if any, of each dependency.

    The configuration option Aptitude::CmdLine::Why-Display-Mode can be set to any value that --show-summary accepts; if --show-summary is present on the command-line, it overrides this option. In future releases of aptitude, the configuration option will be Aptitude::CmdLine::Show-Summary.

    As you can see from the following screen-shot, this option does not wrap lines intelligently yet, so the output can become messy if you have long dependency chains and narrow terminals.

    

  • [gtk] When the user clicks on a package in the dashboard's list of upgrades, the changelog display automatically scrolls to that package.

  • [gtk] Some common notifications are now marked with the icon of the task they're performing.

    

  • [gtk] Initial support for incremental search (currently you have to click the incremental toggle button to enable it).

    

  • [gtk] Ctrl-PageDown and Ctrl-PageUp, or F7 and F6, now switch to the next or previous tab, respectively.

  • [gtk] A link now exists below the package description to open all the other packages from the same source package.

    

  • [all] The aptitude dependency resolver now continues searching for a few steps after it finds a solution, in the hope that it can find a better one. (Closes: bug #482825)

  • [all] The aptitude dependency resolver now adds a bonus to the default apt resolution for a dependency (that is, the first non-virtual package listed). The default bonus is 400 and it may be configured via Aptitude::ProblemResolver::DefaultResolutionScore.

  • [all] Setting the environment variable APT_ROOTDIR to a directory name will cause aptitude to use the given directory as the root for the purpose of locating apt files.

• Crashes and serious errors:

  • [gtk] Don't crash in the dependency chains tab. (Closes: bug #514714)

  • [gtk] Don't crash when the user views the information tab of a virtual package.

  • [all] Fixed some serious inefficiencies in the algorithm used by safe-upgrade. It's still a bit slow on very large upgrades, but not as ridiculously slow as it was before.

  • [all] Fixed a bad interaction between the dependency solver and reinstatement of unused packages, which could cause a situation where a solution from the solver would actually lead to broken dependencies, due to a conflict declared on the newly reinstated package. (Closes: bug #522881, bug #524667)

• Cosmetic and UI bugs:

  • [gtk] Changelogs are now downloaded and parsed in the background. aptitude still sets the download up in the foreground, and this can take a long time if there are lots of available upgrades.

  • [gtk] A background thread is used to find the packages that match a search pattern and to build the list of matching packages for display.

  • [gtk] Some work on the download screen, although more is needed.

  • [curses] Don't warn the user about removing an Essential package if they're just purging the configuration files of one they removed already. (Closes: bug #513472)

  • [curses] Don't compute an excessive amount of why information every time a package is selected. Should make the curses interface much less sluggish. (Closes: bug #516296)

  • [cmdline] Add a missing newline in the error message that aptitude why prints if it has no arguments. (Closes: bug #514676)

  • [cmdline] Fix some badly formatted messages that are displayed when a build dependency can't be installed: they were missing punctuation and newlines. (Closes: bug #492615)

  • [cmdline] Make the warning asking the user to use safe-upgrade instead of upgrade a bit clearer.

  • [cmdline] Always display [held] next to the state of held packages.

  • [cmdline] Pre-compute the column sizes needed to display why, so that columns don't wrap in Stupid Places[tm]. (Closes: bug #516389)

• Minor bugs:

  • [all] The dependency resolver's scoring of full package replacement was not behaving as intended in the corner case that the package was replaced due to a virtual package it provided, and some other version of the replaced package didn't provide that virtual package. The intent was to give the non-providing package a bonus, but instead the versions that got replaced were getting a bonus (more or less negating the whole point of the full replacement score).

  • [all] The resolver should now more correctly obey approval constraints set by the user (solutions that were previously rejected and aren't rejected any more can be returned).

• Internal changes:

  • [all] The dependency resolver now supports hypothetical reasoning: it can calculate a solution to a dependency problem from a starting state that isn't the live state of the package cache. This is used, for instance, to compute an upgrade before any packages are marked for upgrade.

  • [all] Implemented support in the dependency resolver for propagating knowledge about dead-ends up the search tree. Currently disabled as it turned out to greatly increase the memory and CPU overhead of a search without significantly decreasing the number of steps needed.

  • [all] The dependency resolver now stores solutions as sets of choices rather than explicitly maintaining several lists for the different types of choices a solution can contain (for instance, installing a version vs leaving a Recommends unresolved). This makes things a bit cleaner and should make it easier to add new types of choices if that turns out to be useful.

  • [gtk] The Glade file now stores each tab as a separate top-level widget, which makes it a lot easier to edit and add tabs.

• Documentation:

  • [doc] Improve the documentation of --purge-unused.

  • [doc] Improved documentation of the resolver (in addition to documenting the new features).

• Translation updates:

  • Asturian (Closes: bug #518981, bug #519693)
  • Danish (Closes: bug #512384)
  • German
  • Italian
  • Norwegian Bokmål (Closes: bug #510977)
  • Spanish (Closes: bug #517272)
  • Swedish (Closes: bug #511238, bug #514011)

[1/18/2009]

Version 0.5.1

One step at a time

• New features:

  • [all] New match term: ?term-prefix(term). This is like ?term, but it searches the Xapian database for any term which is an extension of term. For instance, ?term-prefix(hour) matches any package that contains the terms hour, hourglass, hourly, etc.

  • [all] If the user asks for the changelog of a version of a package that's currently installed, aptitude will use the local copy instead of downloading a new copy off the network. If the local copy can't be used for some reason, aptitude will fall back to downloading a copy.

  • [all] Implemented resolver hints: you can now place options in apt.conf that control how the aptitude resolver treats particular packages. For a full discussion see the user's manual, but here is a flavor:

    Aptitude::ProblemResolver::Hints
    {
      "reject pulseaudio";          // Prevent the "pulseaudio"
                                    // package from being installed
                                    // by the aptitude resolver.
      "approve ?name(emacs[0-9]*)"; // Always choose emacsNN over
                                    // any alternatives.
      "300 ?true /unstable";        // Give a 300-point bonus to
                                    // any version in the
                                    // "unstable" archive.
    };
    

    Currently these hints do not influence the choices made by the immediate dependency resolver (the one that runs as soon as you mark a package for installation).

  • [gtk] aptitude now parses the dpkg status pipe, so it can show a progress bar while dpkg is running. Closing the terminal tab does not terminate the install; only destroying the progress bar does that.

    

  • [gtk] The search entry box's background will turn slightly red if the current text is not a valid search pattern.

    

  • [gtk] If the user enters an invalid search pattern into the search entry box, the error will be shown below the box (rather than being shoved onto the apt errors pane).

    

  • [gtk] aptitude prompts for confirmation before killing a download or a dpkg process. The download prompt might be superfluous, but considering the possible side-effects of killing off dpkg, that prompt will remain for the foreseeable future.

    

  • [gtk] aptitude will print a message to its embedded terminal before and after running dpkg.

    img failed to resize: Exception 410: no images defined `Resize'

  • [gtk] A drop-down box of package filters is available under the text box where searches are entered. This lets you quickly filter a list of packages by some common criteria (showing only packages that aren't installed). This list should be configurable, but that feature is currently broken.

    

  • [gtk] The automatically installed flags of packages can be toggled from the Package menu or from buttons in the description pane.

    

  • [gtk] Undo -> Undo works.

  • [gtk] When viewing a dependency solution, you can choose to see the actions in their logical order (equivalent to typing o in the curses front-end).

    

  • [gtk] In the version information tab (the one you get by double-clicking a package), selecting a different version in the list of versions causes information for that version to be shown instead.

  • [gtk] You can now change which columns are visible in a package list by selecting View -> Edit Columns... or by clicking the ... column heading.

    

  • [gtk] New package list column: automatically installed.

    Each value in this column is displayed as a check-box, where the box is checked if the package is automatic. The check-box can't currently be clicked because I'm worried that people would click it by accident while trying to select a package. Most likely the rendering will be changed in the future to look less clickable.

    

  • [gtk] New package list column: archive.

    

• Crashes and serious errors:

  • [gtk] Fix several crashes, including one at start-up, that were caused by some unusual package states.

  • [curses] Use the new ?term-prefix pattern to make incremental search work again.

    

• Minor bugs:

  • [cmdline] aptitude why-not no longer crashes when the final argument is a virtual package.

  • [gtk] The Download started row in the Downloads page is no longer shown.

  • [gtk] The dependency chains tab no longer misses some chains that aptitude why would show.

  • [gtk] Fix buffer problems due to sprintf by using aptitude's safer variant of that function. (Closes: bug #511559)

  • [gtk] When extracting just the part of a package's changelog that corresponds to versions that are newer than the currently installed version, truncate the changelog as soon as we see the version numbers go backwards -- that is, as soon as the previous version in the changelog is newer than the current version.

    This is important because some packages changed their version scheme over time. For instance, g++-4.2 lost its epoch in 2004 when the package name changed. But that doesn't mean that those earlier versions of the package should be displayed when we want to display the log for today's upgrade!

• Cosmetic and UI bugs:

  • [all] The --help output now mentions --gui and --no-gui.

  • [gtk] Many tweaks and improvements to the appearance of the UI; particular thanks to Luca Bruno for his patches. The program looks a lot nicer overall as a result of his work.

  • [gtk] The RC style tiny-button-style is used for tab close buttons.

  • [gtk] Use the yes icon (a green sphere) to indicate that a package is installed and OK. This is far more recognizable for me (dburrows) than the hard disk icon we were using before.

    

  • [gtk] Not-yet-implemented menu options produce a not implemented message.

    

  • [gtk] Some menu items are disabled if they don't apply to the currently selected object.

    

  • [gtk] When the user performs an action on several packages at once, any packages they install will be marked as manually installed, and package states won't change to fulfill dependencies if those dependencies are already satisfied by the selected actions.

    For instance, suppose that the user selects A, B, and C for installation. A depends on D | B, and B depends on C. Previously aptitude might decide to install D to fulfill A's dependency, and would mark C as automatically installed because of B's dependency. Now, just the three selected packages will be installed, and they will all be marked as manually instsalled.

• Documentation:

  • [doc] Wrote a new section of the documentation describing the various dependency resolution mechanisms in aptitude. This includes the old section on resolving dependencies, but also describes the immediate resolver and how to configure the full resolver using resolver hints.

• Internal changes:

  • [gtk] Redesigned the dpkg terminal creation code to make it cleaner and more maintainable.

  • [gtk] Redesigned the code for the buttons in the package description pane.

  • [gtk] Stopped using random bits of the glade file as templates for other GUI elements, in preparation for making each tab a separate top-level widget in the file.

• Translation fixes:

  • Fix how ngettext is used so that the plurals can be properly translated. (Closes: bug #505675)

  • Slovak (Closes: bug #505676)

[11/19/2008]

Version 0.4.11.11

And the moon be still as bright

This is purely a translation release for Debian lenny.

• Translation fixes:

  • Catalan (Closes: bug #499464)
  • German (Closes: bug #500444)
  • Greek (Closes: bug #498583)
  • Italian
  • Romanian (Closes: bug #502413)
  • Slovak (Closes: bug #498910)
  • Spanish (Closes: bug #501096, bug #502695, bug #502696, bug #502697)
  • Traditional Chinese

[11/10/2008]

Version 0.5.0

Wheee!

This version introduces the GTK+ frontend. Thanks are due to Obey Arthur Liu for providing code, ideas and energy to the project, and to Google for funding his work through their Summer of Code program in 2008.

This is an EXPERIMENTAL, DEVELOPMENT release. It can be used for package management, but there may be bugs, there are probably places that need improvement, and it is certainly incomplete.

• New features:

  • Integrated the GTK+ frontend written by Obey Arthur Liu for the 2008 Google Summer of Code. To manually suppress the GUI, run aptitude --no-gui or set the option Aptitude::Start-Gui to false.

  • Added Xapian support. Unadorned strings in search patterns now search the apt Xapian database built by Enrico Zini. There is also a new search term ?term that does the same thing.

  • Added the command-line option --show-resolver-actions to display why aptitude made the decisions it did in aptitude safe-upgrade.

• Known Regressions:

  • Incremental searching in the curses frontend is made much less useful by introducing Xapian. It still works, but because Xapian searches don't find substrings, the search will fail to match anything until you finish typing the entire search string.

  • Documentation for the GTK+ frontend has not yet been written.

[9/5/2008]

Version 0.4.11.10

Upon the empty winds of time

• Bug fixes:

  • Serious bugs:

  • Never, ever remove an Essential package from the curses UI without asking the user first. I chose a very simple implementation for this patch because of the pending release of lenny, and so users who are removing Essential packages will get prompted twice. But I feel this is better than occasionally not prompting at all; it will be cleanup up later, once lenny is out.

  • Minor bugs:

  • Fix displaying the section descriptions in non-UTF-8 locales. (Closes: bug #483464)

  • Add the ?task search term, which was documented in some areas but not others, and wasn't actually implemented due to an oversight.

• Documentation bugs:

  • A whole pile of minor improvements suggested by jidanni. (Closes: bug #497374, bug #497340, bug #496726, bug #471347, bug #496719, bug #496729, bug #496732, bug #497333, bug #497336, bug #497726, bug #497969)

  • Give the right name for the preview limit configuration option: it's Aptitude::UI::Preview-Limit, not Aptitude::Preview-Limit.

  • Generate the HTML documentation in a UTF-8 encoding.

• Translation fixes:

  • Brazilian Portuguese (Closes: bug #496613)
  • Czech (Closes: bug #497287)
  • Dutch (Closes: bug #497965)
  • Kurdish
  • Japanese (Closes: bug #494816)
  • Lithuanian (Closes: bug #496504)
  • Norwegian Bokmål
  • Simplified Chinese (Closes: bug #497550)
  • Ukranian

[8/3/2008]

Version 0.4.11.9

This message brought to you courtesy of the Friends of Poland society.

• Bug fixes:

  • Minor bugs:

  • Don't annoy every Polish user with a warning about a badly formed string in the aptitude-defaults configuration file. Also added some documentation for translators telling them about the pitfall that led to this bug happening. (Closes: bug #483459)

  • Fix some case fallthroughs that would cause the wrong information to appear in the archive (%t) column for virtual packages.

  • Correctly handle install-and-mark-auto commands that are targeted at a particular version, like install foo/testing+M. Previously aptitude would completely ignore the archive in this case.

• Translation fixes:

  • German
  • Slovak
  • Swedish (Closes: bug #490782, bug #490818)

[7/4/2008]

Version 0.4.11.8

Happy Fireworks Day.

• Bug fixes:

  • Minor bugs:

  • Fix a long-standing and annoying bug that would cause aptitude to sometimes delete package lists if downloading new copies failed. (Closes: bug #201842, bug #479620)

I'm happy to announce that Obey Arthur Liu, one of the students assigned to Debian for the 2008 [Google Summer of Code][soc], is working on a GTK+ interface for aptitude. His GTK+ interface will be a completely new interface for aptitude, designed from scratch to exploit the capabilities of a graphical environment while building on the backend code that underlies the command-line and curses interfaces.

You can find Arthur's development blog, with the latest news regarding his progress on this project, at http://www.milliways.fr.

[6/28/2008]

Version 0.4.11.7

Yes I can

• Internal changes:

  • Fix several compilation errors on exotic architectures. (Closes: bug #488132)

• Translation updates:

  • Basque
  • Portuguese (Closes: bug #482094)
  • Thai

[6/21/2008]

Version 0.4.11.6

Take two

• Internal changes:

  • Fixed several places where the code was a bit sloppy in ways that were harmless at the moment but were turned up by -Wall -Werror.

[6/21/2008]

Version 0.4.11.5

A tisket, a tasket

• Bug fixes:

  • Crashes and serious errors:

  • aptitude will no longer suggest removing Essential packages to fulfill dependencies unless you explicitly allow it to. Also, removing apt (if it is allowed) will be scored as if apt were an Essential package, meaning that it should show up last in any list of solutions. (Closes: bug #486748)

  • Minor bugs:

  • aptitude add-user-tag and aptitude remove-user-tag will return 0 instead of a random value when they succeed.

  • Translation updates:

  • Dutch (Closes: bug #486858)

  • Romanian (Closes: bug #486934)

• Internal changes:

  • Consistently build with -Wall -Werror (it wasn't being used in all subdirectories of the code).

  • Clean up various minor and potential bugs turned up by increasing the warning level.

[6/7/2008]

Version 0.4.11.4

Turn down the suck.

• New features:

  • aptitude download now properly handles both patterns and things like version specifiers that contain a tilde.

  • New option --disable-columns to search that prevents aptitude from trying to reformat its output into columns. This should be useful for people trying to call aptitude from scripts. (Closes: bug #136874)

• Crashes and serious errors:

  • Fix a problem with assigning scores in the dependency resolver that severely distorted the relative weights of packages. If a package conflicted with a virtual package that it also provided and replaced, aptitude would randomly score some of its versions as if they were full replacements of the current version. This could lead to surprising and wrong resolver outputs. (Closes: bug #483920)

• Documentation bugs:

  • Fix some broken internal links.

  • The manpage formatting of <literal> elements is correct now. They're bolded, and literal file extensions don't get misinterpreted as groff escapes. (Closes: bug #473580)

• Translation updates:

  • Install defaults files for locales that contain an underscore, like pt_BR. (Closes: bug #483620)

  • Russian. (Closes: bug #483943)

[5/26/2008]

Version 0.4.11.3

Not looking back.

• Crashes and serious errors:

  • aptitude unhold should work now. (Closes: bug #477165)

  • Fixed viewing changelogs at the command-line, which was almost totally broken in recent releases. (Closes: bug #481458)

  • Fix getting the changelogs of bin-nmued packages from the curses interface. (Closes: bug #333468) For some reason when this was fixed for the command-line mode, the equivalent change didn't make it into the curses codebase.

  • Don't die with an assertion error when --show-why is used in the presence of impure virtual packages.

• Cosmetic and UI bugs:

  • Always be at least as quiet as the user requested; when aptitude automatically enabled quietness if its output wasn't a TTY, it could actually become less quiet than otherwise! (Closes: bug #476749)

  • If the user asks for the justification of a manually installed package, try to find a nontrivial answer (some other package that requires it) instead of just telling them that it's already installed. (Closes: bug #477038)

  • Remove an incorrect hyphen in the output of --help. (Closes: bug #476835)

  • When the resolver is run several times in a row without user interaction (for instance, in safe-upgrade), only print Resolving dependencies... once.

  • When listing the complete chains of dependencies that are holding a package on the system, show A provided by B as A <-P B, not AP<- B. (i.e., add a space after A)

• Build system fixes:

  • VPATH should be supported better in doc/.

  • Most files will generate Doxygen output now (they were missing \file tags).

• Documentation bugs:

  • Clarify how aptitude's search language behaves in some syntactic corner cases, like ~nname?installed: the ? is part of the string parameter to the first matcher, not the start of a new match term ?installed.

  • Change the documentation of aptitude why: it shows why packages should be installed, not why they can be installed, and be clearer about what happens when why is called with a single argument.

  • Fix the manpage to talk about Recommends-Important instead of Install-Recommends. (Closes: bug #480533)

• Translation updates:

  • Brazilian Portuguese (Closes: bug #481007)
  • Danish (Closes: bug #476732)
  • French
  • Galician (Closes: bug #476837)
  • German (Closes: bug #476344)
  • Japanese
  • Norwegian Bokmal (Closes: bug #480063)
  • Polish (Closes: bug #480062)
  • Simplified Chinese (Closes: bug #475740)
  • Vietnamese (Closes: bug #477295)

[4/9/2008]

Version 0.4.11.2

How far the sky,
how cold the night,
how still the flowing river.
How sharp the air --
so pure the light --
beneath Orion's quiver.
Beneath the frozen, staring,
starry sky we lay a-shiver.

• New features:

  • The information area can display tabs for the alternative views it supports. This is off by default because I found that it was too intrusive (mainly because it appears between the short and the long description of a package). If cwidget gets the ability to put tabs at the bottom of multiplex widgets, I might change this.

• Documentation bugs:

  • Fix several XML errors in the manpage source (Closes: bug #473722)

• Bug fixes:

  • Crashes and serious errors:

    • Make the safe resolver not explode exponentially when new Recommendations are present.

      The root cause here was that the mandate mechanism the safe resolver uses to ensure that it progresses monotonically towards a solution didn't work in the presence of Recommends, so the resolver ended up exploring the entire space of possible resolutions to packages' Recommendations. This is the as large as the power set of the list of recommendations, hence the exponential behavior. (Closes: bug #474680)

    • Don't crash if a package's Section is empty. (Closes: bug #474115)

  • Cosmetic and UI bugs:

    • The why installed information display in the package list will now display an informative message when no package is selected, the same way that the related dependencies display does.

    • The why installed information display should work better for newly installed packages now.

    • aptitude --version prints more information about the libraries it was compiled against.

    • Help -> About prints a correct copyright date now.

    • The status indicator has been rewritten so that it no longer needs numeric conjugation (meaning it won't say there are 1 update). (Closes: bug #486186 and friends)

    • why and why-not now appear in the list of commands in aptitude --help. (Closes: bug #454088)

  • Minor bugs:

    • Use a latch configuration option to migrate from Recommends-Important, instead of just clobbering the old option. (Closes: bug #473872)

    • Treat packages that were removed but whose configuration files remain on the system as if they're not installed in the output of --show-why.

    This fixes some cases where --show-why would hide the reasons for some installations.

• Translation updates:

  • Galician (Closes: bug #474672)

  • Vietnamese (Closes: bug #473719)