[packagekit] Improved pkt tool

[Richard Hughes]

On Fri, 2007-09-07 at 10:10 -0400, Ken VanDine wrote:
> That is what i generally use too... pcon is very useful.   However, I
> love pkt.py as an example python interface.  I will need to write a
> few of these for very specific uses, so having a good example is very
> nice.  Even better would be to create a PackageKit-python api, really
> making it easy to create external apps to interface with PackageKit.

Sure, that's not a bad idea. I'm no python dude, but it sounds a good
idea for bolt on stuff.

> Some examples of things I plan to work on:
>  * Hardware monitor, hal sees a device plugged in, call PK to install
> the driver (if needed)

HAL calling into PK, might work, although I would argue just install the
driver anyway....

>  * Distro major version upgrades, going from FL 1 to FL 2 will be
> switching labels, so calling PK to update to
> group-dist=foresight.rpath.org at fl:2

On first thought, I'm not sure changing the backend config options
through PK is a good idea.

Maybe we could open-code it such that:

SetBackendOption(s=data_string)

data_string:
"enable repo development:

and let the backend do the decoding. Unfortunately that means having
policy (PolicyKit action) stuff as well.

I suppose that repo management could be abstracted nicely too, although
this is all starting to feature creep.

as=GetRepos()
ChangeRepoState(s,b)
ChangeRepoData(s,s)

Comments and opinions welcome.

> The distro upgrade tool will probably be something that runs at
> startup but doesn't display an icon.  It will just monitor an rss feed
> to see if it should suggest and update.  When it sees a major upgrade,
> it will call PK to do the work and let the user confirm it.  These are
> the types of upgrades that don't happen very often, but require some
> extra info to perform.

The likes of fedora and ubuntu also need this, so it would make sense to
add this tool in some form into PackageKit. What sort of UI and
interface were you thinking of?

Richard.