I am excited to announce the immediate availability of QApt and Muon 1.0.

This marks the point where both QApt and Muon are ready for general use. Here is a list of changes from the release candidate:

QApt 1.0

Fixed a crash that occurred when trying to get the version of a package that lacks a version due to APT pinning rules. (Bug 246799)

General improvements to the LibQApt API documentation. All public functions and members should be completely and accurately documented as of this point.

Think forward a bit and make sure we can handle rare-as-of-now ultra-large packages, the size of which in bytes can not be represented by an int. (E.g. a couple of gigabytes) Use a double instead. (qint64 typedef)

Muon 1.0

Felix Geyer deserves a big thank you, as he is responsible for most of the improvements I am about to list. Thanks again!

Select the “All” item in the filter widget views by default for clarity’s sake. Thanks for Felix Geyer for the patch.

Improve reliability of clicking on the filters. (Felix strikes again)

As a nice little convenience, if we revert all changes inside the preview widget, Muon will now return you to the main few. (Felix once again)

Improve the reliability of the changelog fetching code, reducing the risk of files not getting deleted/the wrong changelog being displayed when quickly scrolling through packages with the keyboard. (Felix)

My chance to shine 😉 Only listen to progress reports from the QApt Worker if we are actually the one that asked. Otherwise we could try displaying progress from another application such as QApt Batch and crash since we don’t have the progress widget set up.

Packages are available from the usual location, with the exception of Maverick, where things are delayed a bit as I prepare to get Muon in the official archives for 10.10. They should be available by tomorrow if everything goes well. Source for QApt and Muon are available here and here, respectively.

The future

I have some ideas of what I’d like to accomplish for 1.1. Here’s a list of some of them:

Implement version locking support

Improve the download view, with per-item progress

Implement a history log viewer, now that APT has a consolidated history log. (Will require APT from 10.10)

Add a configuration dialog for configuring things like whether or not to treat recommended packages as dependencies or not, and other APT settings.

“Slow” search that does not rely on Xapian and can search in specific package fields. This would supplement fast search, which will remain prominently in the main GUI. (Slow search will probably only be accessible from a menu in the menubar)

Of course, I’d also like to write a more Software Center-esque custom GUI for application installation. For that I will have to write a parser for app-install-data, and use that parser to filter what is shown in a GUI that is geared towards the technically non-elite. I’ll also have to figure out a clever way to limit the Xapian quick search to the applications. I am a bit unsure how to accomplish this as of yet.

So, enjoy Muon. QApt will be getting a bit of use via QApt Batch in 10.10, but until 11.04 we really need to test the heck out of QApt and Muon to ensure that Muon will be a good choice for inclusion by default in 11.04. (It’s not that I doubt that they are good and ready now, but every single time we have jumped on the latest and greatest it’s come back to bite us, even if it was a popular decision beforehand.) If we can make sure that they are good, we will ensure that they rock for 11.04. 🙂 Muon will be available for install in the official repositories for 10.10, so there is no excuse to go out and test it while waiting for 11.04. 😉

Thanks, and enjoy.

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