While I was browsing Planet SUSE, I noticed that Duncan Mac-Vicar is working on faster package management and is looking for help in testing and such:

The whole stack is now designed as unix tools, so this will allow our repositories to ship solv files, which can in turn be downloaded by libzypp. So you don’t need to generate a cache locally if the solv file is already available on the server. This is not implemented yet.

There also other open issues. We don’t parse translations and only the suse media parser stores attributes like descriptions. Patches and packages are not installed (but this has also another reason I will talk about it later). The package management user interface won’t compile (I haven’t tried) yet.

This new level of performance would allow us to bring package management on openSUSE not to the smart or yum level, but a complete new generation ahead. And this will open the door for smooth integration with CIM and PackageKit and will bring fresh air during the road to the next generation of SLES and SLED.

If you are an openSUSE contributor, we do need help with testing, and there are lot of “mechanical” jobs to do which don’t require much experience with the platform (but compiling). If you want to see this in 11.0 and can contribute, please contact us .

Since I know we all want to have the fastest package management possible, I’m sure there will be a mad rush of openSUSE folks looking to contribute.

Oh, and Duncan totally gets it right here:

I haven’t blogged since some time. We have been working hard to get package management stack changes in so we can have them in one of the next alphas. I wanted to make a small pause and write about it because communication is (sometimes) as important as coding

Emphasis added, and I couldn’t agree more…

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