Hello, I've recently uploaded a new version of debtags, in view of jessie, that disables merging tag sources. I feel that debtags is rather overengineered, and 10 years after it was started as an experiment I want to scale it down to match the actual reality.
So, with regards to tag data inside an installed system, tags are distributed within the apt Packages files, and "debtags update" only copies tag data from apt to /var/lib/debtags/package-tags, so that applications that want to load the entire tag database in memory can do so quickly without needing to scan the entire package database. This means that the debtags command itself can be simplified a lot: debtags cat -> can be replaced by cat /var/lib/debtags/package-tags debtags check -> was never used afaict, it can be removed debtags diff -> was never used afaict, it can be removed debtags dumpavail -> can be replaced by apt-cache dumpavail debtags show -> can be replaced by apt-cache show debtags vocfilter -> was never used afaict, it can be removed debtags grep -> can be reimplemented using apt-xapian-index debtags search -> can be replaced by axi-cache search What is left is: - "debtags tag {add|rm|ls}" and "debtags submit" that can be used to submit patches to debtags.debian.net via the command line. - tagcat, tagshow, tagsearch that query the tag vocabulary - "debtags update" Rather than refactoring the C++ code of debtags (which depends on libept, and I'd like to get rid of libebt), I'd just rewrite everything in python3, so that we get an "Architecture: all" package to ship with the rest of the vocabulary: - debtags update -> can be implemented running "apt-cache dumpavail" or "grep-aptavail -sTag ." via subprocess.Popen and parsing its output. - debtags grep -> can be implemented in axi-cache instead of debtags - tagcat, tagshow, tagsearch -> can be implemented with the module debian.deb822 in python3-debian - "debtags tag {add|rm|ls}" and "debtags submit" can be reimplemented as-is or rewritten with a better interface And then Enrico Rossi pointed out that it needn't necessarily be me doing the rewrite. Please reply to this message if you're interested. I'm excited at the idea of not being the only one writing/maintaining bits of debtags. Enrico -- GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enr...@enricozini.org>
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