[packagekit] Announcement: PackageKitInstaller

[Richard Hughes]

On Sat, 2008-12-06 at 10:37 -0800, Sebastian Heinlein wrote:
> 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. 

This is great news.

> 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.

This is not so great news. It's also so similar in name to PackageKit
users will get confused and I'll be getting the bugs assigned to
PackageKit and emails form confused users. Please, call it a different
name, something that does not have PackageKit in it.

> 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.

I don't want users getting this confused with PackageKit -- and they
will. You have to be clear that it just implements the session DBUS
interface, and is nothing to do with the packagekit.org project. Maybe
SessionInstaller or something?

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

I guess. We also need to review the session interface at some stage, as
at the moment it is a few ad-hock methods on a random interface. It
would be good to work through these properly and get the names perfect
before we get too many projects implementing them.

Richard.