[packagekit] pkcon and familiarity

[Rahul Sundaram]

Richard Hughes wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-04-14 at 01:13 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> Not having to learn/unlearn different quirks in between command line 
>> utilties that essentially does the same job in between distribution is
>> very useful. Comments?
> 
> What do you think needs to change? I'm open to changing pkcon if there's
> consensus from everybody.

I have installed apt and smart along with yum in rawhide to do a 
comparison. There is no man page for pkcon.I will write a man page if 
someone guides me through some of the options that aren't quite clear to 
me. That aside I haven't done a exhaustive comparison yet but a few 
suggestions based on yum:

* yum shell is very useful. I would like to see a pkcon equivalent.

* update-system can be dropped. update without a additional parameter 
should update everything.

* install-file can be dropped. install should just look for both 
packages and if that fails files and then do the right thing. Yum does 
this already.

* search without a additional parameter should search through the name, 
details, description etc and more parameters can be used to narrow the 
search as it currently is.

* Not sure what resolve does but should be either list or resolvedep in yum

* get description is called info in yum

* get repos is called repolist

* get groups is equivalent to grouplist. yum also supports groupinfo, 
groupinstall and groupremove.

* get depends is equivalent to deplist

* get updates is equivalent to check-update

* get requires is equivalent to provides?

* yum supports list. list installed, list available, list extras.

* In yum, enablerepo and disablerepo are for the current session while 
in pkcon it is permanently. This is one place where the similarity 
causes confusion.

I probably haven't covered everything here but this should give you a 
better idea atleast.

Rahul