[packagekit] RFC: Add a GetTestingUpdates method?

[Richard Hughes]

In Fedora-land we've got a problem in that people don't use the -testing
repositories much at all, and therefore updates get little testing
before being pushed to stable. I think the only way to do this is make
enabling the testing repos easy, and also provide new users with a
"teaser" that there are other updates available.

I've attached a screenshot of what this could look like.

I did think we could overload the GetUpdates method (with a filter?),
but this fails for three reasons:

* Most session tools assume all packages from GetUpdates are upgradable,
and don't do any sort of filtering
* Getting the testing updates means syncing more repos which leads to
more network traffic, something we don't need for all but one of the use
cases
* With PkInfoEnum we don't know which packages are testing and
non-testing, and we would have to lump the together as one type
(available?)

I propose a new method: GetTestingUpdates(filter)

This allows us to get the updates and populate a menu, but won't allow
us to enable or disable the repos. To do this I propose that we use:

SetRepoData("*", "testing", "true") and
SetRepoData("*", "testing", "false")

Where "*" means all (not completely happy with this part, maybe
SetSystemState might be better).

An alternative to the new method might be to add a parameter to
GetUpdates(string:type, string:filter) which allows us to return other
types of update lists in the future. The new parameter has the advantage
that it's a trivial change to make in the daemon and client tools, but
we don't know whether a backend supports a different type before we try
to use it. Yet another method wasn't really on my Christmas list.

Ideas welcome.

Richard.

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