[packagekit] GNOME summit and more about GPG keys

[David Zeuthen]

On Tue, 2007-10-09 at 21:11 -0400, Robin Norwood wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> So, I gave a little demo of PackageKit at the GNOME summit on Monday.
> It went well.  Nothing crashed.  :-)  There were some good questions and
> comments afterwards.  The response seemed positive to me.  There was a
> bit of a discussion about "How applications can install plugins with
> PackageKit".  For instance, gimp plugins and gstreamer codecs.  To be
> able to do this, we should probably have simple python and C bindings to
> install things with a semantic of "give me a package which provides
> 'x'".  The bindings we have now are pretty close, and maybe just example
> code needs to be easily available.

I would recommend exposing such services on the *session* message bus so
all I'd have to do in e.g. Totem or the Gimp or whatever would be to
(this is python):

 bus = dbus.Bus(dbus.Bus.TYPE_SESSION)
 installer = dbus.Interface(bus.get_object("org.fd.PkgKit",
                                           "/"),
                                           "org.fd.PkgKit.Installer")
 installer.InstallCodecs(["audio/mpeg" , "audio/wma9"])

or if I'm a hardware application I'd use modalias

 installer.InstallDriversForDevices([
   "usb:v413Cp8103d2422dcE0dsc01dp01icE0isc01ip01",
   "pci:v00008086d000027D8sv00001028sd000001C8bc04sc03i00"])

and so on. The UI stuff in the program providing the org.fd.PkgKit
service will drive the installation with either native GNOME or KDE or
whatever UI.

     David