[pacman-dev] Maelstrom(Pacman in C#) project brief

[Bozhidar Batsov]

My implementation of pacman's functionality codenamed "Maelstrom" has 
reach a usable state. I actually managed to graduate thanks to it, as it 
was my graduation task, so now I'm an engineer from the Technical 
University of Sofia, Bulgaria. Currently my project supports most of 
pacman's capabilities + a few more, but I was thinking what is the 
community's opinion on the subject - is there any point in developing 
another pacman... I'd like to hear from you, because I was thinking to 
do a complete overhaul of Maelstrom to make it more sturdy and elegant 
and to release it to the general public, but maybe that will be 
pointless if no one thinks there is the need of another implementation 
of the package management system. Here are some finer points of the 
maelstrom project:
1. This is not a client for libaplm - it is a complete framework written 
from scratch without even consulting the original source code. It 
consists of a couple of libraries and two clients - one console app and 
one written in GTK#. Everything is 100% percent coded in C# 2.0.
2. Instead of the current db format - files hierarchy located under 
/var/lib/pacman, maelstrom relies of a RDBMS for it's bookkeeping, 
though it creates the entries in pacman's DB as well for backwards 
compatibility.
3. I can initially import in it's DB the current state of pacman's DB.
4, It understands the format of pacman.conf and parses it natively.

Here are a couple of screenshots:
ftp://78.128.17.199/sync.png
ftp://78.128.17.199/refresh.png
ftp://78.128.17.199/whirl.png