Tue, 06 Mar 2007

Conflict finder script - The next generation

I got some feedback for the script which tries to find conflicting packages I hacked together after the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage.

Seems to be a useful tool, so it might be nice to add it to devscripts?

Some criticized, that it won't work perfectly, since I only check against files mentioned in Contents-<arch>.gz where files / folder created in a maintainer scripts are not listed.

I know that, but I don't know a useful way to solve the problem. It's better than nothing, and maybe I'll find later a way to add support for installation time created files.

Thanks to Kevin Mark and Marc Bockschmidt who pointed me to some improvements for the script, which reduced the time the script takes dramatically! While my first hack needed for a simple package nearly 15 minutes, the new one is down to one or two minutes. Thanks!

So please test it a bit; feedback is alway welcome. You can find the latest version at http://www.schmehl.info/tmp/conflicts".

Special thanks to Alexander Wirt and Thomas Viehmann who did proof of concept rewrites in perl and python. Alexanders perl version is quite fast... but needs a huge amount of memory. Thomas' python version is very elegant! You don't need to understand python to understand his script. Nice done, but could need some further improvements; since it takes as much time nearly as my bash script. And since I hope it might be interesting for devscripts maintainer, and I'm not sure if they would like to add a dependency on python, I think my bash script has - for now - the lead :))

The script could still need some improvements. For example tweaking the code a bit; I'm sure many of the things I do with pipes from awk to another awk to sort (or something like that) can be cone my awk itself. I Just don't kno how. And instead of fetching the Contents-<arch>.gz from the main server, the script could tread it from the users prefered mirror... and maybe even support for other downloaders than wget.

postet at 09:14 into [Debian] permanent link


About

Alexander Tolimar Reichle-Schmehl lives in Tuttlingen / Germany. He works as IT manager (specialized on Unix and SAN/Storage) for an international automotive supplier.

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