[packagekit] Announcement: PackageKitInstaller

[Sebastian Heinlein]

Hello,

We had a discussion of the PackageKit situation on Debian/Ubuntu at
FossCamp yesterday. The main issue is still the need to add a lot of
workarounds to integrate the interactiveness of APT well. 

But since we don't want to delay the use of PackageKit anymore we will
perhaps take two approaches: 

On the one hand providing the PackageKit infrastructure by shipping it
by default, but not making use of the gnome-packagekit applications. So
that it can be used in cases where we can assure the unattended
installation e.g. in Jockey. 

On the other hand we would add a replacement for the session D-Bus API:
PackageKitInstaller. I am not sure about the name and if you, Richard,
thinks its to far away from the original idea of PackageKit I would also
change the name.

PackgeKitInstaller uses D-Bus activation on the session bus and
currently calls synaptic for the actual installation. I plan to switch
this to a native python-apt client. It is currently only at a rough idea
and prototype.

See here for a screencast:

http://glatzor.de/fileadmin/files/screencasts/packagekit/packagekitinstaller.ogg

Code is hosted at Launchpad:

https://launchpad.net/packagekit

Packages are available:

https://launchpad.net/~packagekit/+archive

This whole idea doesn't make me happy but seems to be a practical
solution.

Cheers,

Sebastian