[Synaptic-devel] [synaptic] build bug report & patch, feature request

[Fabien COUTANT]

Hi synaptic writer(s),
I'm gonna try to keep this short...

I have built synaptic this morning for my Debian Woody.
I had to make a few changes so that it compiled with g++ 2.95 (yes I know
its C++ library is incomplete).
Since the changes are small I think you could take the attached patch into
account, to increase the portability...
Most notably it lacks vector::at() and string::clear().  The former is
easily replaced with [], and I replaced the latter with
.erase(.begin(),.end()), though I see only now that string="" is by far
simpler.  There was also a missing include<algorithm>, which I guess is a
true bug w.r.t the standard.  And rpackageview.cc complained that
strcasestr isn't declared (string.h requires _GNU_SOURCE for its
visibility).

Now I have a few remarks/requests to submit:

1.  It would be nice if synaptic could be used by non-root users, to
browse, search and inspect packages typically.  I tried to fool it using
fakeroot and setting HOME, but it still tried to write to ~root, not ~me.

2.  Using VTE terminal's default foreground and background colors, text is
made unreadble by antialiasing.  At least synaptic should use a better
default, such as black on white, instead of white (grey?) on black; At most
terminal fg and bg colors should be settable like package status related
colors.

3.  "-o" options of the command line are undocumented, so I don't even know
whether I could use it to solve problem 1 or 2.

4.  A filter for orphaned = dependant-less packages would be quite
practical.  This is different than (and shouldn't require) deborphan, since
it lists all packages -- not just libraries, and need not be recursive
(i.e.  I don't mind listing packages which dependants are orphaned).

Thanks and Keep Up The *Very* Good Work :)

-- 
Hope this helps,
Fabien.

synaptic-0.55.3+fc.patch.gz
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