Status report of "ipkg-unstable install task-complete"

On Mar 1, Carl Worth wrote:
> One torture test would be to try to install task-complete with
> the new ipkg-unstable. It would be great news to hear if that
> works, (it would also be interesting to collect time
> statistics and compare to the old version).

I just tried this after installing task-bootstrap, and Wow! It
worked. And much better than I expected.

The Good
--------
It completed very quickly -- much faster than the most recent versions
of ipkg.

It seemed to process things in the correct dependency order, (eg. it
installs libraries before packages depending on the library). I
believe that it was the addition of this feature that really slowed
down the old ipkg.

It seemed to run all postinst scripts, (eg. I had the
/usr/bin/x-window-manager link when I was done), so maybe the "Could
get not CWD" bug will no longer bother us. (Hurrah!) I did do the
entire installation without bash installed.

The Bad
-------
Some of the unarchive code that we sucked in from busybox complained
about some invalid CRC data in zip archives for a few packages, (eg. I
know I saw it on xstroke). Strangely enough, xstroke still works
fine, so I really don't know what happened. We really should fix the
deb_extract function soon so that it returns an indication of success
or failure, (it's bizarre, but the current function gives no
indication of this).

The Ugly
--------
Just a nit here: ipkg-unstable complains about things like "Package
xlibs is already installed" when installing madplay, just after it got
done installing xlibs. No harm in this, but I will track down the
recursive traversal that isn't bailing out soon enough.

-- So, this whole thing might be ready for more general consumption
sooner than I thought. I do still want to get conffiles handling and
proxy support in place before a straight "ipkg" release or else there
will be complaints.

Cheers,

-Carl

-- 
Carl Worth                                        
USC Information Sciences Institute                 cworth@east.isi.edu
3811 N. Fairfax Dr. #200, Arlington VA 22203		  703-812-3725