Sunday, November 9, 2008

Zypper 1.0.0

We're closing to the release of openSUSE 11.1 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 11. Since zypper's releases are tightly tied to those of openSUSE, this is also an important milestone for zypper. Thus, the next release of zypper will have version 1.0.0. This marks more than two years of zypper's development and the outset of implementation of new nice features.

So what's next?

Several ideas and problems appeared so far. Some need to be implemented in libzypp itself, some are purely zypper's. Here is a list of the most important things for zypper 2.
  • Configuration file (.zypperrc).
  • Nice overall install progress.
  • Much improved install summary (options to view version/vendor/arch changes, changelog, ...).
  • More options to handle patterns (remove, install suggested, ...).
  • Advanced media error handling with options like eject DVD drive, select DVD drive, edit failed URI, enable/disable medium specific options.
  • Fixed or removed zypper shell (can it be useful enough to be worth to maintain it?)
  • Interface to new libzypp functionality like 'download only'.
  • and more...
First there will be some bug fixes during the beta phase of SLE 11, mainly with respect to compatibility with SLE 10 version of rug. These (and all following releses for SLE) will be versioned 1.0.x and will eventually get also to openSUSE 11.1 via online update. After that we're ready to work on zypper 2.

Stay tuned on features.opensuse.org, this TODO file, this blog and blogs of other ZYpp hackers (see my links).

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

i think zypper shell will be usefull only if will be improved...

example

zipper > in dummy && rm mypackage


that option is not allowed, and imho will be an important feature

jano said...

zypper shell was never meant to have such complex command-shell-like features. It is meant to allow you to execute multiple commands one after another while initializing and reading repositories just once (thus saving you time). This was crucial in openSUSE 10.2 and 10.3, but it's not that important with libsatsolver and satsolver-tools integrated.

However, you can achieve what you describe like this:

zypper> in pkgtoinstall -pkgtoremove

The same holds true also outside of zypper shell, of course. See man zypper for more details.

jano said...

To clarify the future of zypper shell: fixing it so that it works whatever command you execute in it requires a lot of work. So the question is whether we still want it (that is, its two and only features - its command history and the possibility to execute multiple commands without initializing and reading the repositories, unless needed). Or whether there is something that would improve the shell to the point where the effort would make sense.

My current guess is that it is not worth the effort. There are no strong requests for keeping it, and it has low priority for a long time (since 11.0 actually). That said, it will stay untouched unless somebody finds time to further fix it, not to mention improve it, since there are still more important things to do. Anybody is welcome to fix and maintain the shell, however :O)

But it would not be that much of an effort if we'd forbid repository handling commands and --repo option in the shell. Maybe that could be a way to go...

Francis said...

Thank you for your awesome work!