software

Past monday (sunday night, actually) I was struck by gastorenteritis. I've had this before, but this time it was worse: even tuesday evening I had trouble eating anything small, my stomach turned all over itself again though I was fairly hungry.

On the upside, after a few days rest and once I started feeling a bit better again, I had plenty time to finish a pending upload for GNOME Apt. No new features, just some code refactoring on the inside – to fix bugs and compilation with newer library versions. One particular change was to substitute GnomeConfig with a simple replacement wrapper based on GKeyFile. I had two reasons not to use GConf: backwards compatibility, and the fact that I believe GConf is over-architectured for an application such as gnome-apt which rather needs a barebones configuration system instead. Only if I would figure out a way to initially run as non-root and do privilege elevation in-process rather than start from gksu or some similar helper, would it be useful to take a look at GConf again.
On a somewhat related note, I have also quickpatched my private copy of stormpkg to be installable again with libapt 0.6.x, but it seems that finally the archive has outgrown it's CList-based package tree implementation. When I tried to swap out gnome-apt's internal widget for a TreeStore, the latter turned out to be too slow to be usable, but the stormpkg CList could easily handle the same packages datasets and kept doing so for a while. But now it has become even worse than that TreeStore implementation used to be; apparently it has now crossed a certain threshold and it takes minutes even just to start. Time to let it go, it has had it's time.