..feeding the attention whore within

Over the last week I’ve been messing a bit with smart again. :)
I’ve now merged in 1.1.1 from trunk into my own mandriva branch and
started work on a urpmi channelsync plugin. This plugin will read urpmi’s configuration from /etc/urpmi/urpmi.cfg, use the same metalink data under /var/lib/urpmi
and has also initial mirrorlist support using urpmi’s mirrors cache from /var/cache/urpmi/mirrors.cache, picking the first (thus closest) mirror from that list.

There’s a lot of room from improvement, and it’s pretty dependent on urpmi’s data for all of this, ie. it doesn’t support quite yet to fetch mirror lists itself, picking the
nearest mirror or anything by itself yet, but it works quite well if urpmi has done much of it’s job for it, which is usually the case and makes it work sufficiently
for it’s intended purpose so far!

I will continue to work on implementing support for using several mirrors, generate metalinks, set up and maintain it’s own similar configuration independent of urpmi ++, but this is quite neat progress so far since it makes using smart on a Mandriva system easier and nicer to use. :D

Yesterday I updated smart in cooker with a snapshot of my branch, so people using smart on cooker will from now on find their urpmi medias listed as channels in smart, prefixed with ‘urpmisync-’. Note that these channels aren’t stored persistently in smart configuration, but will always reuse whatever that’s urpmi’s current configuration.

Oh, and also, this obsoletes ‘urpmi2smart’ and the earlier version of ‘distro.py’.

Since I implemented the urpmi aria2+metalink stuff for urpmi earlier and has been starting to focus on doing work on smart now, trying to implement the neat stuff etc. from urpmi, I yesterday thought that it could be nice to implement python bindings for Tatsuhiro’s libmetalink library. This especially since the API was quite simple and seemed easy to implement, and I’m also quite fond on writing python modules in C, python’s C API really rules (in deep contrast to perl’s, like.. wtf? using the C preprocessor to do all sorts of obscure stuff rather than just doing regular C coding?? obscure & fugly!).

Tatsuhiro is also the author of aria2 which I have positive experience with, with him always fulfilling my feature requests for aria2 in no time, I guess using his libmetalink library should be cool as well. :)

So today I finished up my first release and published it on pypi with a project and bzr repo at http://launchpad.net/pylibmetalink.

I’ve also done some work on libmetalink, adding some functionality I needed for pylibmetalink as well as adding some other improvements as well. If you’d like to use pylibmetalink, you’ll need this andyou’ll find my bzr branch for it on the launchpad project page as well. :)