Urpmi Development

urpmi Development

This is a page to document and discuss future urpmi development.

[edit] What to do

Allow to force reinstall of an already installed package. (how to conveniently get the list of all incomplete / corrupted packages on the system ?) (bug #16112)
Allow urpme to remove bundles, i.e. metapackages. More precisely, when urpme sees that it's being asked to remove an empty package with dependencies, it will assume it's a meta-package and will try to remove as many dependencies as possible without breaking "outside" packages, for some value of outside that we should define algorithmically.
Support for new RPM tag Requires(hint) (Suggests and Enhances).
Allow virtual sources multiplexing several urls. NB. Due to shifts in synchronization between mirrors, this might be extremely tricky to implement, and turn out to be completely unusable.
- Not sure if same, but support for Metalinks would be great, like aria2 supports this as well as segmented downloading which would help with slow mirrors
- Choose mirrors automatically based on location with geoip, in combination with metalinks this would remove any need of choosing protocol, mirror etc.
urpmi should list all .rpmnew and .rpmsave files rpm has created at the end of the installation.
When downloading rpms from remote media it would be nice to install packages while downloading as it can take quite some time to download all packages

urpm's way of dealing with exceptions and the way to use eval{} blocks to catch them is currently convoluted. It prevents discriminating between "normal" errors and fatal errors (e.g. ENOSPC or "network down"). Define exception classes and use them consistently.
Automated regression tests would be nice to have (also for the URPM module.)
inst.list is obsolete. Deprecate it.

Should we replace urpmi.addmedia and urpmi.removemedia by a more flexible and generic urpmi.media? There are backward compatibility issues.
Several operations on medias cannot be done from the command-line (add/remove the "update" flag, set default medias).

More options should be configurable from rpmdrake or from the software media manager: optional key verification of rpms, probe synthesis or hdlist, limit download rate, skip.list, display changelog first.
Have a "yes to all" button for long and boring series of questions
The software media manager should display the urls of the media and/or their type in the main window
The software media manager should be callable from rpmdrake (replacing the "update media" button.)
(handwaving ahead) the interface of the rpmdrake suite of tools is both too complex and too simple, and needs another pass. In short, it needs to DWIM a bit more, taking more decisions (a bit like urpmi --auto) instead of annoying the user with endless questions and popups. The interface could also be enhanced by simplifying the main windows, deporting some of the items in a menu, and adding a configuration window for "advanced" settings.
The packages blocked by skip.list should appear in rpmdrake (in update mode), but with a lock icon (unselectable for upgrade).
rpmdrake should be made faster. Profile it. Don't reload the package list everytime. Load it in the background when possible.