News

Non-update (6.4.2024)

Apt-rpm is not being brought back to life, but links have now been restored from the move back under laiskiainen.org domain, for aspiring software archeologists.

Development version 0.5.15lorg3.94 released (11.01.2008)

• Progress meter cosmetics improvements
• Fix crash on empty transactions (rhbz#419811)
• Make private headers really private
• Make apt.cron a bit more quiet (Pierre Ossman)
• Avoid downloading same source package multiple times (Michael Vogt)
• Fix garbled output in text progress (Ryan Burns)
• Avoid alignment traps on ARM (Ryan Burns)
• Fix http password handling (Ryan Burns)
• Add support for 64bit MIPS (Ryan Burns)
• Remove support for ancient /var/state/apt directory use (Ryan Burns)
• Some repomd sqlite extension optimizations
• Improved failure handling for repomd
• Improved obsoletes handling on multilib systems
• Portability fixes (David Halik)
• Bunch of code correctness fixes (type-pedantry etc)
• Fix building with current GCC 4.3 snapshot
• Check for rpm features, not versions
• Fix build against rpm.org HEAD (Ralf Corsepius, me)
• fix build against rpm5.org 4.x versions (hopefully)

Development version 0.5.15lorg3.93 released (23.08.2007)

• OS X portability fixes
• pkg-config support
• Support source packages in repomd sqlite backend
• Some fixes for building with newer rpm5 versions

Development version 0.5.15lorg3.92 released (08.07.2007)

• don't re-download unchanged indexes
• don't require sqlite for repomd support
• fix long-standing crash on ctrl-c
• saner library soname
• resurrect repomd group (aka comps.xml) download
• fix assert failure on missing repomd release files

Development version 0.5.15lorg3.91 released (16.06.2007)

• support for sqlite repomd metadata, automatically used if present
• upped cache limits for todays bigger repositories
• improved multilib setup, runtime configurable
• various repomd optimizations
• installation progress API
• several large memory leaks plugged
• add API for package changelog and file listing access, implement access methods in Lua-interface, apt-cache and apt-shell
• various code cleanups

Known regressions in 0.5.15lorg3.91:

• "apt-get update" re-downloads unchanged indexes
• missing repomd indexes not always handled cleanly (assert failures)
• progress meter doesn't show percentage of the complete operation
• sqlite(-devel) is required for building apt-rpm with repomd support for now

APT-RPM development switches from Subversion to GIT (25.02.2007)

In short, APT-RPM development now happens in GIT repository instead of SVN. See the download section for the access information. For the inevitable questions as to why, here's the short summary:

• Distributed SCM's support my personal working habbits better than the centralized ones. The rest of the reasons are just nice add-on bonuses basically.
• Distributed SCM's conceptually matches the APT-RPM development work much better than a centralized one.
• "But why GIT and not <insert your favorite distributed SCM name here> ?" This is simple: GIT being a lowlevel core application, it doesn't require me to build half the world's libraries on the hosting server to run. Besides, it's just screaming fast :)

Kernel VM bug causing apt cache corruption (15.01.2007)

There's a bug in some recent kernel versions (2.6.18.3 - 2.6.19 or thereabouts) causing corruption in apt's package cache. It causes apt to crash with segmentation fault in some circumstances, on some systems this happens more often than on others due to different memory usage patterns. More details about the bug can be found in this LWN article. The fix is to upgrade (or downgrade) you kernel to unaffected version, or if that's not possible for whatever reason there's a bandaid patch that helps avoiding crashing attached in this bug report.

Development version 0.5.15lorg3.90 released (07.09.2006)

• a big man page overhaul: docbook/sgml tools aren't needed for building them and contents have been revised for apt-rpm (Vincent Danen, Ralf Corsepius)
• fancy new progress meters during rpm transaction
• lots of code cleanups and reorganization: type correctness, old obsolete code and various redundancies removed etc (Ralf, me)
• some new operations in apt-cache and apt-shell
• big speed improvement in cache build with repomd repositories (~20% speedup)
• build time options to disable repomd- and SELinux-support

Stable version 0.5.15lorg3.2 released (22.06.2006)

• fix crash on package installation in some conditions (Daisuke Suzuki)
• fix crash on out of sync filelists.xml
• fix crash on packages with no files
• fix crash on repositories created with createrepo -n
• fix regression in promoteepoch handling
• fix rpmdb lock counting to avoid deadlock in gpg-import script
• fix building with older compilers (eg gcc-2.96)

Stable version 0.5.15lorg3.1 released (22.05.2006)

• full support for mixed binary + source repomd repositories
• support repository-level pinning on repomd repositories
• fix removing multilib packages
• fix off-by-one error causing first package of repositories to be ignored
• work around inconsistency from some old createrepo versions
• fix type-punning errors/warnings from rpm code
• treat zero epochs consistently everywhere (remove them) on newer rpm systems, leave alone on older (<4.2.1)
• new scripts added to contrib: preserve-conf and apt-cron
• saner defaults for a few items (eg automatically ignore gpg-pubkey "packages" etc)
• fix building Synaptic against apt-rpm
• several auto*tool cleanups and fixes (Ralf Corsepius)
• update gettext to 0.14.5, require external intl (Ralf)
• improved handling of src.rpm names (Ralf)
• several code readability, safety and bug fixes (Ralf)
• updated German translation (Ralf)
• honor quiet mode in rpm progress reporting (Daisuke Suzuki)
• updated Japanese translation (Daisuke)

APT-RPM moves again (04.05.2006)

APT-RPM now has it's own second level domain apt-rpm.org, kindly donated by NetNix!

Yes, the timing is a bit inconvenient as the dust had barely landed from the previous move. Apologies for any inconvenience caused, the previous address will redirect to the new site as long as needed. Oh and no more home page moves after this, and that's a promise... ;)

Stable version 0.5.15lorg3 released (22.04.2006)

• support for common repository metadata aka repomd repositories!
• fix building with gcc 4.1, several other compiler warnings cleaned (Ralf Corsepius, Philipp Thomas)
• allow self-referencing provides in packages
• support for most runtime probe-type dependencies with rpm >= 4.4.4
• clean up DistroVerPkg handling
• several cleanups + fixes to repomd, auto*tools and translations from Ralf Corsepius
• update sources.list manual to document currently supported repositories
• some cosmetic improvements to apt-cache output

Stable version 0.5.15lorg2 released (06.02.2006)

• improved multilib support
• sources.list entries can now contain $(VERSION) which will be substituted with contents of APT::DistroVersion configuration value or the version can be determined from an installed package by setting APT::DistroVerPkg to appropriate package, eg "fedora-release"

Stable version 0.5.15lorg1 released (31.01.2006)

• barebones multilib support hack for x86_64
• support for rpm >= 4.4.3, including Suggests handling
• support for negative package pins (eg "anything but this version")
• support for candidate versions for virtual packages
• Progeny's http redirection and authentication patch added
• fix for segmentation fault in apt-shell virtual package handling
• read-only rpmdb lock taken during initial dependency calculation instead of exclusive lock
• auto* stuff tweaked to build out of the box on FC
• some tweaks to python bindings build
• Lua scripts now live in /usr/share/apt/scripts instead of /usr/lib[64]/apt/scripts

Information about old cnc releases can be found on the archived old APT-RPM site.