After a bit of work, today I decided to start using mpm, the mancoosi package manager, to upgrade my laptop. My first use of it on a production system - until now I run all my experiments in throw-away virtual machines - and it works !
Not rocket science here. During the last month David Kalnischkies (of APT fame) visited our offices in Paris and together with zack worked out a communication protocol between apt-get and the mancoosi cudf solvers (EDSP). I guess somebody is going to announce all details about this endeavor soon. This cooperation enabled us to advance in the integration of apt-get and the mancoosi technology.
Reusing the same protocol, and backend I developed to translate the apt problem to cudf (and to call a suitable solver), I’ve re-wrote large part of mpm and added the possibility to generate the installation plan before calling dpkg and really installing the selected packages.
Below notice the intermediate calls as Inject Model , Simulate, Compare Models . These are at the moment stubs that are going to call the simulation framework developed at mancoosi.
The food :
abate@zed.fr:~/Projects/git-svn-repos/mpm$sudo ./mpm.py -c mpm.conf update
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Inject Model ...
abate@zed.fr:~/Projects/git-svn-repos/mpm$sudo ./mpm.py -c mpm.conf upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following new packages will be installed:
libtracker-client-0.8-0 libnet-ip-perl libio-socket-ssl-perl libasyncns0 libapr1
5 to install
Simulate
Proceed ? yes/[no]
yes
Reading package fields... Done
Reading package status... Done
Retrieving bug reports... Done
Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done
Reading changelogs... Done
apt-listchanges: Mailing root: apt-listchanges: changelogs for zed
Reading package fields... Done
Reading package status... Done
Retrieving bug reports... Done
Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done
Reading changelogs... Done
apt-listchanges: Mailing root: apt-listchanges: changelogs for zed
(Reading database ... 179534 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace libapr1 1.4.2-8 (using .../libapr1_1.4.4-1_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libapr1 ...
Preparing to replace libasyncns0 0.8-1 (using .../libasyncns0_0.8-2_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libasyncns0 ...
Preparing to replace libio-socket-ssl-perl 1.40-1 (using .../libio-socket-ssl-perl_1.43-1_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libio-socket-ssl-perl ...
Preparing to replace libnet-ip-perl 1.25-2 (using .../libnet-ip-perl_1.25-3_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libnet-ip-perl ...
Preparing to replace libtracker-client-0.8-0 0.8.17-2 (using .../libtracker-client-0.8-0_0.8.18-1_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libtracker-client-0.8-0 ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up libapr1 (1.4.4-1) ...
Setting up libasyncns0 (0.8-2) ...
Setting up libio-socket-ssl-perl (1.43-1) ...
Setting up libnet-ip-perl (1.25-3) ...
Setting up libtracker-client-0.8-0 (0.8.18-1) ...
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/locale: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/man: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/gnome/help: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/omf: 0 KiB
Total disk space freed by localepurge: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/locale: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/man: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/gnome/help: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/omf: 0 KiB
Total disk space freed by localepurge: 0 KiB
Inject Model ...
Compare Models ...
abate@zed.fr:~/Projects/git-svn-repos/mpm$
Reg the installation plan, this is an xml file that will be passed to a simulator developed by the university of L’Aquila to make sure that the installation script (well, a model of them), will not cause any problem during the installation.
The format is a very simple xml file as follows :
<selectionStates>
<selectionState type="Install">
<param name="package" value="libapr1" />
<param name="version" value="1.4.4-1" />
<param name="architecture" value="amd64" />
</selectionState>
<selectionState type="Install">
<param name="package" value="libasyncns0" />
<param name="version" value="0.8-2" />
<param name="architecture" value="amd64" />
</selectionState>
<selectionState type="Install">
<param name="package" value="libio-socket-ssl-perl" />
<param name="version" value="1.43-1" />
<param name="architecture" value="all" />
</selectionState>
[...]
Soon APT will ship a patch to use the very same infrastructure of mpm (yeii !!!). This will on one hand make mpm useless as package manager on its own. It is a simple hack in python and I never tough to compete with its big brothers. On the other hand I think it will stand as a nice workbench to experiment with new ideas, to prototype new features and to make it easier for poeple that are not c++ experts to play with the APT library (thanks to python-apt) in a semi structured environment. The code is in the mancoosi svn if you want to have a look.