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).