[packagekit] PackageKit & Debian, Was: External dependencies, DeviceKit-power and GNOME Power Manager

[Richard Hughes]

On Tue, 2008-11-25 at 23:26 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> To sum up, the main concern that I have heard from most interested
> Debian developers about PK is its lack of support for debconf. If PK was
> able to answer to queries from a DBus-based debconf frontend to show the
> questions, everything else would be a matter of fixing our tools and a
> few broken packages, and of course to improve the backend.

A DBus based frontend to show questions smells very much like an
out-of-band transaction, which I would argue should be done in the
existing transaction framework.

There's more details about transactions here:
http://www.packagekit.org/gtk-doc/introduction-ideas-transactions.html

> From previous discussions, I understood that you were not willing to
> accept patches that would add support for querying the user. If your
> mind has evolved on this topic, that would certainly encourage some of
> us to code it.

Sure, have a look at the link above. If you read what I said in context,
you'll see that I'm refusing to block the transaction and wait in that
state for user input. It's perfectly okay if the transaction is stopped,
and then the user can answer questions and requeue without blocking
other transactions for all the other users on the system.

> And to make things clear, the intent is certainly not to flood the user
> with questions he won’t understand. We continuously hunt abuse of
> debconf and remove or lessen the priority of annoying questions.

What sort of questions do you want to ask the user? Will any of these
people http://www.packagekit.org/pk-profiles.html know what the answers
should be?

Richard.