[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)

[3/30/2008]

Version 0.4.11.1

No, no, fool, I said bring me the FLUFFY Bunny Slippers of EXTREME Dismemberment, not the EXTREME Bunny Slippers of FLUFFY dismemberment! Does an evil overlord have to do everything himself around here?

• New features:

  • The command-line argument --show-why will cause all installation and removal commands to display a brief summary of the dependencies related to an installation or removal. For instance:

    The following NEW packages will be installed:
      libboost-iostreams1.34.1{a} (for wesnoth)  wesnoth
      wesnoth-data{a} (for wesnoth)  wesnoth-music{a} (for wesnoth)
    

    Note that wesnoth-music is a dependency of wesnoth-data, not wesnoth. --show-why displays the manually installed package behind each automatic installation. If -v is passed on the command-line, it displays the entire chain of dependencies leading to each manual package.

    --show-why also handles upgrades:

    The following packages will be upgraded: klibc-utils libklibc (for klibc-utils)

    --show-why is limited to the capabilities of the logic behind aptitude why. Although libklibc might be the package that was originally marked for upgrade, --show-why has no knowledge of this fact: it just knows that klibc-utils requires libklibc.

  • In the ncurses interface, added a menu entry to cycle the display in the lower pane (equivalent to pressing i but more discoverable).

  • The ncurses interface now displays the number of packages in a tree next to the tree header, and in the information area when the header is highlighted.

  • The header for the list of versions in the ncurses interface now reads Versions of <package> instead of just Versions.

  • A new extract-cache-subset command that will create a reduced copy of the package cache, removing all but a given list of packages and all references to packages not in the list. It's intended for, e.g., generating test cases for package managers.

• Bug fixes:

  • Crashes and serious errors:

    • Handle exceptions thrown by the Debtags constructor (e.g., when debtags has been purged and there are no data files) instead of just crashing. (Closes: bug #472695)

    • Eliminate a case where we would access uninitialized memory while starting up, found thanks to valgrind.

  • Cosmetic and UI bugs:

    • Correct the documentation within the on-line help of how to leave the on-line help (it was never updated when the help went from being a dialog to being a top-level view).

    • Correctly save changes to string configuration options. (Closes: bug #471315)

    • Don't print an error on startup when debtags isn't installed. (Closes: bug #472678)

    • Use less technical language when why fails to find a derivation for A transitively requires B.

    • Eliminated some cases where description signals for tree headings weren't being connected. These weren't noticable in the past because in most cases, the heading had no description anyway.

• Translation updates:

  • The aptitude-defaults.* files are now installed to /usr/share/aptitude. (Closes: bug #472625)

  • Simplified Chinese (Closes: bug #458162, bug #473363).

  • Vietnamese (Closes: bug #473229)

[3/15/2008]

Version 0.4.11

When you're tired of being beat with a stick, you're tired of Debian.

• New features:

  • Search terms can be named with words instead of single-character flags. Each new-style search expression starts with a question mark (?), followed by the name of the matcher; for instance, ?obsolete is equivalent to the old-style expression ~o. At the command-line, package names containing question marks are treated as search expressions, just like package names containing tildes (~) are.

    The old-style syntax is still present and works just like it did previously. See the reference manual for complete documentation of the new syntax.

    This will hopefully make the search syntax more memorable and make it clearer what a given search expression actually does. In addition, this opens up the possibility of greatly expanding the number of search patterns supported by aptitude (the requirement to choose a meaningful and unique single character had become a major limiting factor in the ability to add new search terms).

  • New search terms:

    New search terms added to aptitude 0.4.11

    Term	Meaning
    ?source-package(expr)	matches packages whose source package matches the given regular expression.
    ?source-version(expr)	matches packages whose source version matches the given regular expression.
    ?all-versions(expr)	matches a package if expr matches all versions of that package.
    ?any-version(expr)	matches a package if expr matches any single version of that package.
    ?user-tag(pattern)	matches a package if it has an attached user-tag matching the given regexp (see below).
    ?for var: expr	binds var inside expr to the package or version being tested.
    ?bind(var, expr)	matches anything if the package or version bound to var matches expr.
    ?=var	matches the package or version bound to var by an enclosing ?for.

    For instance, ?for x: ?depends(?recommends(?=x)) will match any package X that depends on a package that recommends X.

  • aptitude now supports attaching arbitrary strings to packages, known as user tags (to distinguish them from debtags tags). The following commands will manipulate user tags:

    aptitude add-user-tag    tag package...
    aptitude remove-user-tag tag package...
    

    Each of these commands will add user tags to or remove them from one or more packages (possibly selected using search expressions). In addition, all command-line actions that modify package state now take the following optional arguments:

    --add-user-tag         TAG
    --add-user-tag-to      TAG PATTERN
    --remove-user-tag      TAG
    --remove-user-tag-from TAG PATTERN
    

    The variants that take a PATTERN will add tags to or remove tags from any packages that match the given PATTERN. (e.g.: --add-user-tag-to installed-for-build-dep ?action(install)). The variants that do not take a PATTERN will affect any package that is being modified (this is equivalent to using the pattern ?not(?action(keep))).

    The ?user-tag(tag) matcher will select packages with a tag matching the given regular expression. User tags also show up at the end of package descriptions, next to the list of debtags tags for a package.

  • All command-line actions that modify package state now accept the arguments --safe-resolver and --full-resolver. --safe-resolver forces the command to use the same resolver logic as --safe-upgrade (e.g., aptitude install --safe-resolver exim4 to install exim4 as long as it can be installed without removing any packages). --safe-resolver can be enabled in the config file by setting Aptitude::Always-Use-Safe-Resolver to true; passing --full-resolver will override this configuration option.

    The option --no-new-installs and the new option --no-new-upgrades will control whether the safe resolver attempts to install new packages or upgrade installed packages.

    Future versions of aptitude will enable this logic in the curses UI as well, but I haven't decided how it should be exposed yet.

  • The aptitude dependency resolver will now refuse to adjust held packages or install forbidden versions unless you manually allow it to. This behavior can be disabled by setting Aptitude::ProblemResolver::Allow-Break-Holds to false.

    aptitude will still break holds when packages are being automatically installed; there is a pending patch against apt that eliminates this behavior.

  • The aptitude dependency resolver will add a bonus to solutions that remove a package and install another package that fully replaces it by declaring a conflicts/provides/replaces relationship. (Closes: bug #466374)

  • aptitude now has a build-dep command that will install build-dependencies from the command-line. (Closes: bug #243317)

  • A new subdirs variant of the section grouping policy is introduced in this release, courtesy of Paul Donahue, and is enabled by default. This will behave just like the old sectioning policy, except that if a section has several components (for instance, games/arcade/space), they will all be realized as tree levels in aptitude.

    A side effect of this change is that section descriptions are no longer hard-coded in the source (see the documentation of Aptitude::Sections::Descriptions).

  • Command-line updates in aptitude will now list packages that are newly obsolete. This doesn't work when a source is removed and all its packages become obsolete, for technical reasons.

  • aptitude now uses libept to handle debtags information instead of a slow and wrong internal implementation. (Closes: bug #397652, bug #406201) aptitude update will merge new package information into the debtags database automatically by running debtags update --local.

• Bug fixes:

  • Cosmetic and UI bugs:

    • The curses interface now uses a spinner to indicate download progress, since the percentage measurement can't be made correct in the current apt model.

    • Remove some stray cw:: strings that made it into user-visible messages (thanks to Jacobo Tarrio for pointing them out).

    • Interpret %-escapes in the descriptions of configuration options instead of displaying them to the user; thanks to Jens Seidel for pointing this out.

    • At the command-line prompt, don't list packages that aren't being upgraded unless the user tried to upgrade them. e.g., aptitude install foo will no longer spew the entire list of pending upgrades to the terminal.

    • When displaying dependencies or version numbers at the command-line (i.e., -D or -V is passed), add an extra space between packages, to make it a little more obvious which tags belong to which package.

    • If the resolver is allowed to produce the solution 'cancel all actions' (i.e., Aptitude::ProblemResolver::Discard-Null-Solution is false), the brief indicator in the UI will say that it cancels all the pending actions instead of counting its component actions.

    • When displaying the packages that could satisfy a versioned dependency, don't list packages that provide the package name unless they declare a versioned provides that matches the dependency's version restriction. (Closes: bug #464131)

    • Don't try to generate and then parse a matcher when searching for packages that look like what the user typed; instead, write explicit code to compare against package names and descriptions.

    This allows aptitude to find similar package names even if the corresponding command-line argument is an invalid search pattern (without having to write complex escaping logic); e.g., aptitude install +5 does something sensible instead of printing a confusing error message.

    • If the user enters q during command-line dependency resolution, quit the program instead of falling back to manual resolution; manual resolution is only used if automatic resolution hits a fatal error or if the user requests it by typing x. (Closes: bug #459629)

  • Translation bugs:

    • Generate POTFILES.in automatically, so it stays up-to-date without requiring manual intervention.

    • Flag W_() as a translation marker; failure to do this caused a lot of strings to be incorrectly left out of the translation files; pointed out by Jens Seidel.

    • Fix translation of strings displayed by the options editor (they weren't getting translated at all); thanks to Jens Seidel for reporting this.

  • Minor bugs:

    • Fix task handling in the case that different versions of a package are in different tasks. (Closes: bug #459348)

    • safe-upgrade will now attempt to automatically maximize the upgrade. Hopefully this will eliminate the situation where you run aptitude safe-upgrade and then discover that there are still some upgradable packages.

  • Crashes and serious errors:

    • aptitude will now build with g++ 4.3, assuming that 4.3-compatible versions of cwidget and sigc++ are installed. (Closes: bug #452204, bug #452540)

    • Reduce the translation percent threshold for the various versions of the manual until it compiles. (Closes: bug #470054)

    • aptitude now uses Apt::Install-Recommends instead of Aptitude::Recommends-Important to control whether recommendations are automatically installed. (Closes: bug #458189, bug #448561) Old configurations will be migrated to the new configuration option, if possible.

    Among other things, this means that --without-recommends works again (it was broken when recommends handling moved to apt).

    • Ensure the resolver state is always synchronized with the package cache, eliminating some cases where the resolver would break or produce wrong answers. (Closes: bug #421395, bug #432411)

    • Don't crash at the command-line when displaying the version numbers of packages being removed that don't have an installation candidate; also, the version display for removed packages is now meaningful. (Closes: bug #459336)

    • Don't crash at the command-line when displaying the version numbers of packages in the ConfigFiles state that are being purged; instead, display Config Files as the removed version. (Closes: bug #461669)

    As a side note: the code in question has been adjusted to be robust against bad version pointers, and should display ?? instead. If you see this, it's a bug, but at least aptitude won't crash in this case.

    • Don't crash in aptitude update when the package lists can't be parsed for some reason; instead just go ahead and download new ones. (Closes: bug #468751)

  • Documentation bugs:

    • Fix the documented default keybinding for PrevPage.

    • The documentation of searching has been substantially rewritten, and is hopefully much more useful now. In particular, there's more information about how versions are handled, and a concise table listing all the search expressions supported by aptitude.

    • Document some of the files aptitude uses in a FILES section in the manpage (Closes: bug #470839).

  • Translation updates:

    • Basque

    • French

      • Christian Perrier: Fix the use of quote in the French translation (Closes: bug #460808).

    • Galician

    • German (thanks to Jens Seidel)

    • Japanese (thanks to Noritada Kobayashi)

    • Norwegian Bokmål

    • Portuguese

    • Romanian (thanks to Eddy Petrișor)

    • Russian

    • Simplified Chinese

    • Slovak

    • Spanish

    • Vietnamese

The aptitude Web page has moved to an Ikiwiki instance on algebraicthunk. The page here is incomplete and needs work, but it's already more complete than the old one was.

I need to work out how to automatically get a current version of the aptitude documentation posted on the Web. The easiest approach might be to just automatically fetch the unstable .debs and unpack them by hand (ick). Building on algebraicthunk will require some changes to the aptitude build scripts, which currently require an unstable version of apt to do anything; adding a way to disable building the program and just make docs would help here.