[Debtags-devel] libdebtags big update

[Enrico Zini]

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This is an announcement of cute libdebtags updates:


 * Introduction

I committed the big restructuring to libdebtags as well.  I've been
stealing an entire week from my work to make these changes, I hope it's
been worth it.

Now also the Vocabulary is indexed, which goes for lightning fast
response times for many kinds of queries.  "debtags show" now gives an
answer in no time.  And no full tag vocabulary is maintained in memory
anymore.

Plus, test suites have been introduced in libdebtags as well, although
they have a partial coverage.

I've also updated debtags and debtags-edit to cope with the new library.


 * libapt-front

This starts to be the foundation I'd like to use to implement debtags
support in libapt-front.  I thought it was unreasonable to begin that
task before having a libdebtags that forced all debtags-aware
application to have a long startup time even for trivial tasks.

Nothing is uploaded to Debian yet.  For the upload, I'd like to change
the package names to libtagcoll1-dev and libdebtags1-dev.  I intend
to package libdebtags1-dev as a -dev-only library as well.


 * Future developments

I'd like to study an algorithm to generate a reduced facet list for
the users.
=20
I'd like to get rid of all the Package-related code, including search
and filtering, with the idea that people should use libapt-front for
that.  libdebtags should only do tag-based searches and queries of the
Debian package archive.
=20

 * Trying it

If you try to build and install all the new suite, there are two
caveats:

 - you need a "debtags update": the new tools want to see the index
   there.  However, old tools work fine with the file generated by the
   new "debtags update"
 - debtags-edit is now very slow before displaying a menu with all the
   facets and the tags.  That needs being looked into before thinking
   about a release.


 * Helping

Last, but not least, I'd like to give out some tasks:

 - libtagcoll and libdebtags functions need a bit more doxygening.  Now
   the APIs are a bit more clear, but they still lack documentation.

 - a good form of documentation is also code snippets, both found inside
   the comments ad as small example utilities that come with the
   library.

 - there are test suites, but tests only cover a few code paths now.
   More tests are needed.

Any of these three tasks could be useful for someone who wants a way to
learn how the two libraries work, and I'm happy to assist in explaining
what the header files's doxygen comments fail to explain.


Ciao,

Enrico

--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>

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