I’ll be in Great Britain next week. I’ll come to the Debian Party 2008 in Cambridge on Saturday 23rd August and will be back to London to visit ’till Wednesday 27th August. I’m staying by myself in a nice little hotel in Bloomsbury.
It will be very interesting to meet Debian people and probably do some pitching for my Aptitude GTK project which is making nice progress.
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Hi folks!
We’re almost done for the official Summer of Code program and I thought that I couldn’t let it end without another update, so here we are (you may thank Daniel Burrows for additional poking).
The Gtk+ interface for Aptitude is making great progress. The product is not final yet but already implements many of the planned ideas, with others to come.
Here are the screenies:
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I finally got back from Switzerland. Google invited all the Summer of Code students to visit their offices. I chose to go to the Zurich one. It wasn’t the closest (London was) but it was the largest and it had more engineers than MBAs.
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It has been very interesting meeting other Summer of Code participants from all Europe and a lot of other people of the free software community. There were about 40 people overall for the meeting at Google, along with free beer, cake and nice food.
I finally got back from Switzerland. Google invited all the Summer of Code students to visit their offices. I chose to go to the Zurich one. It wasn’t the closest (London was) but it was the largest and it had more engineers than MBAs.
![]()
It has been very interesting meeting other Summer of Code participants from all Europe and a lot of other people of the free software community. There were about 40 people overall for the meeting at Google, along with free beer, cake and nice food.
Yesterday, 10 July, was the due date for the second
milestone of my work on DebGraph. I am happy to report that
we are roughly two weeks ahead of schedule, so meeting this
milestone was not a cause for worry.
We now have support for the following graph operators:
The next milestone includes the development of a high-level
language (or integration with an existing extension
language) that streamlines the construction of complex
queries using the operators listed above. We can build
arbitrarily complex queries using the C++ operators, but
dealing with the static typing and compiler toolchain can be
very clunky. As such, I have spent the past week working on

I’m going to the Google Europe Headquarters in Zerich, Switzerland, tomorrow (July 10th).
Google is inviting us Summer of Code students, which is really nice.
I should be there in the middle of the afternoon from Paris.
I’ll be wearing a Slashdot tshirt. Drop me a mail or a comment if you go too so we can meet!
Sometimes people propose other solutions to have the Aptitude-gtk project done, like :
I’d have thought that the most interesting way of doing aptitude-gtk would be to write a gtk backend for libcwidget. -Karellen
As this might be of interest to more people, I’ll repost Daniel Burrows‘ response :
Although I can see where you’re coming from, a GTK+ backend to cwidget would have no significant upsides and significant downsides.
The main upside to doing that from a practical point of view is that you would have only one piece of “driver” code for the GTK+ and curses interfaces. You wouldn’t have to rewrite the entire interface from scratch to create a GUI frontend.
I promised to post some updates about how the Aptitude project would be going so here it is.
Here’s what aptitude-gtk currently looks like :

Well, nothing very special right now. It’s really only a testing interface. The final GUI will probably be different. Now you may be interesting by what’s going on behind it ?
Where to start ?
Aptitude is written in C++ with varying dosages of OO coding depending on the age of the code :).