Well, I am not sure why you felt offended, Dan didn't mean it that way.

I'm not offended, I just feared that libalpm could disappear and all my efforts wasted.

What you did is indeed great, that would be the first real frontend using libalpm. (well there is also gfpm using frugalware's libpacman, but I don't think anyone really ported it to libalpm, at least it's not uptodate).

Thanks a lot :)

But actually, that's the point, you are the only one, while there are countless of others tools simply calling pacman, or parsing the stuff themselves.

Exactly. This is the point. Experience teaches me one thing: people stick to habits. I think the only reason I developed Shaman this way is because I'm new to Arch, and alpm already existed. If Shaman previously used pacman and worked, I don't think I'd have taken the risk to port it to alpm. Or maybe, people still fear libalpm. Maybe they don't even know what it does, why it exists. Maybe they think it's a bit harder, well it is. But there is a huge difference.

Still, your project should give us a better idea about the quality and usefulness of libalpm, and I hope that you will have concrete suggestions for improving libalpm and making it more friendly to use :) That's why I showed you the link here. It was not a "oh, look, I'm so good", because I consider myself a really worse coder than the ones who develop pacman/alpm, and I'm speaking for real. I'm not talking about who can code better, I'm talking about ideas, and not coding. Sorry to say that, but Xavier, it was you who answered my mail. It was you who answered Lukas when he asked about alpm version. It is you that says that doors are open, and I really appreciate that.

The point is that, even here, you're the only one. Because nobody else replied to that mail (or at least, replied to the point of that mail) but you. I don't pretend to be the solution of all the problems, and maybe some of my ideas are wrong, but developing Shaman helped me seeing a lot of flaws in alpm. A lot of unsafe behaviours. And this doesn't mean that I think alpm is totally shit. Do you think I'd have developed something upon pure shit? I'm not so masochist. Ok, sometimes I said it was, but it was frustration that made me speak. And I DO think that libalpm is worth the effort. Shaman is the living demostration that alpm works, that alpm is useful, both to developers and users, even if it has some design flaws. And I don't want it to die, because it doesn't have to. Alpm is more stable/efficient than apt/dpkg in my opinion, even if some bad choices in DB handling make it slower in searching and loading the database, but I've seen nothing handling package processing that fast, and that's the reason why I bet on Shaman, and I'd still make the same choice now. But I do believe that libalpm can be even faster. That something can be improved to make it even better. And that should be the question and the direction, being honest on ourself. And not listening to trolls who just say some banal/stupid stuff about SQLite and such, not saying "complicated and not worth it" when you don't even know what that thing could mean. I hope that was a bit clearer. Cheers Dario