[packagekit] Service Packs, PackageKit (and Opyum)

[Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray]

http://hughsient.livejournal.com/51154.html

I just read that you are planning some sort of "service pack" support
for PackageKit targetting use cases where the computer only has no (or
slow) network connectivity and the whole system has to be updated on
multiple computers.

During last year's Summer of Code, I had created a tool named Opyum
(http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DebarshiRay/Opyum) which did something
very similar, but only for Fedora based systems. It creates a YumPack
containing all the dependencies for installing or updating a
particular package(s). The YumPack is in the form of a tarball which
can be carried on any offline medium (eg., pen drive) and using it
should not require any network connection.

The main GUI tool provides a way to create these YumPacks, while
another GUI utility (system-install-yumpacks) allows a single-click
method of installing or updating from the YumPack.

As of now Opyum is only a GUI based tool based on the Pirut modules.
For quite some time I have been planning to port Opyum to a PackageKit
front-end so that it does not stay locked into Fedora land. However I
am not yet familiar with the internals of PackageKit, so I need to do
some ground work before I can actually contribute.

What do you think? Does this make sense?

Happy hacking,
Debarshi
-- 
Free software for the Indian community:
* ftp://fedora.glug-nith.org/ (Fedora)
* http://gnu.glug-nith.org/ (GNU)
* http://mirror.wbut.ac.in/ (CRAN, Fedora, Mozilla, TLDP)