[packagekit] Suggestion

[Richard Hughes]

On Fri, 2008-02-08 at 14:52 +0100, PEDRO MACANAS VALVERDE wrote:
> YES. I.e. I use Huawei E220 USB MODEM (I used before a cablemodem, but
> in my new home I cannot get cable) offered by Vodafone. I downloaded
> the Vodafone package, that depends on wvdial and other packages.

Is the vodaphone package free software? What does it do? Could it be
shipped on the distro CD in the future to avoid this problem ever
occurring?  

> I cannot connect to the Internet to download an updated package list
> (this would be done in Internet using the computer at work  - and a
> web server ?-

This is the main flaw in your idea. Lets say the vodaphone package
you've downloaded has an explicit depends on vwdial. We can tell that
from the header of the vodaphone package.

What we can't tell is what wvdial requires (recursive implicit
dependencies) without the metadata ("package lists") from the
repository. It might be the case that wvdial also needs wvdial-common
and an updated ppp package before it can be installed. So the problem
now becomes how do I cache the metadata and update that offline, and
also then requeue a transaction on the next time round. This sounds a
much harder task to compute, and not one that I think PackageKit should
do.

I think the real solution is to get the needed stuff on the distro
install CD.

Richard.