[packagekit] Resolve method

[Robin Norwood]

Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> writes:

> On Tue, 2007-10-02 at 12:24 -0400, Robin Norwood wrote:
>> What about arch?  In situations where more than one arch is available,
>> IIRC, yum uses a complicated heuristic to try to 'guess' the right one.
>> Should individual backends to the guessing, or return multiple results
>> to let PK or the user pick the right one?  Do you always want Resolve to
>> give one or zero results, or is a list ok in some cases?
>
> Well, Resolve should return:
>
> zero (if not installed and not found in the repo)
> one (in installed version matches and no never package available)
> two (if installed version matches, and there is an updated package
> available)
>
> I think the backend should choose the correct architecture, I don't
> really think this is in the scope of PK - leave it to the package
> backend.

Well, in the multiarch case sometimes more than one arch is 'correct',
in that two different arches (or both) could be installed.  Once case
that I remember where this might affect an end-user was with 64-bit
firefox - most users would prefer the 32-bit firefox, since the flash
plugin would not work with the 64-bit firefox (this may have been fixed
by now, I'm not sure).  OTOH, you don't want users of systems with
multiple arches to see every package twice, and have to worry about
picking arches, etc.  Maybe the right answer is to just make the backend
pick, and if the user needs differnt behavior, the answer is 'use
lower-level tools'.  Or perhaps in the future the PK UI could have an
'arch aware' mode that allows for that.

Probably the solution you propose above is correct enough for now.

-RN

-- 
Robin Norwood
Red Hat, Inc.

"The Sage does nothing, yet nothing remains undone."
-Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching