Help: Wanting to Develop an APT front-end

[LeonBlade]

Hey guys,

I've been searching around and to no luck can I find a way to develop a front-end for APT.
Is anyone familiar with it and how I can go about this?

Thanks.

[avansc]

apt? as int apt-get?

there is aptitude, but any os the that is debian based has a front end for that already.

[LeonBlade]

I know, but I want to make my own front-end.
And yes, like apt-get.

[Ginto8]

I know, but I want to make my own front-end.
And yes, like apt-get.

man pages?

[avansc]

well you just need to be able to run system commands as root. then you need to be able to parse whatever apt-get spits back at you. as ginto said, the man pages are a good place to start.

you could also cache this, http://www.apt-get.org/main/ into a db, that way you dont have to load it every time over the network. just update it if there are discrepancies, im sure you can get a md5/sha of the current state of the repo.

also, i would look at the source of the current gui package manager, that should steer you in the right direction.

[LeonBlade]

That's what I figured I'd have to do, just parse output from system() calls.
Reason I ask is because I'm trying to make something on the iPhone/iPod touch (similar to what Cydia is) and I wasn't sure if I was going about it the correct way.
Seems to be I am, I'll look into it more, perhaps ask on a jailbroken development site.

[M_D_K]

I'm pretty sure there is a lib (which is part of apt) which you can link to, it has all the stuff needed to read the db.

found it: libept