[packagekit] PackageKit 0.1.3 comments / suggestions

[Tim Lauridsen]

Richard Hughes wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-11-14 at 14:16 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
>> Here's a few comments/suggestions about PackageKit-0.1.3-1.fc9 as
>> shipped in Fedora Rawhide. Certainly not an exhaustive test or anything;
>> just issues I ran into while playing around with. All in all PackageKit
>> totally rocks; most of these things are cosmetic issues that should be
>> easy to fix (except for the first one)
>>
>> 1. Clicking around... if the yum metadata is out of date this totally
>>    blows. I keep getting the bouncing progress bar for minutes. This is
>>    especially the case when clicking on an uninstalled package; nothing
>>    happens.
> 
> This is bad.
> 
>>    My suggestion on how to fix this is brutal and controversial and will
>>    make the UI worse. Still, I think it's the right thing to do.
>>
>>    Suggestion follows:
>>
>>    PackageKit's yum backend should never decide when to refresh the
>>    meta data. In the case of Rawhide the metadata (primary + filelists)
>>    is in the 10MB range. This surely affects dial up users too. Here
>>    on the RH Boston network I'm getting like 25kb/s.
> 
> That's not insane; we already have the RefreshCache method to do this
> when the user is idle and the network is up. I'm surprised we are not
> searching from the cache already. Tim, do we do everything from the
> cache or just searching?

Searching is done in cache only, but you can't do everything in the 
cache only.
When cache-only is set, nothing is download, so you can't download packages.
Maybe we can make it a little better if we increase the metadata_expire
there controls when the metadata expire.
default = 1800 seconds.
we could set it to 8 * 3600 (8 hours)
you can try change it in /etc/yum.conf to see how it works, then i can 
add it to the code, if it gives a better experince.

> 
>>  - Would be nice to have a ChangeLog tab too.
> 
> Hmm. This would be useful to me also, can this be provided by other
> backends? I think this warrants another method GetChangeLog() as it may
> contain quite a bit of data and may not be supported - any volunteers?
> 

It is easy to add the GetGhangelog to the yum backend, but there is a 
cost, about 10 MB of extra metadata to be downloaded (Fedora 8 base + 
updates), so i don't think it should be enabled by default.

Tim