[packagekit] Service Packs, PackageKit (and Opyum)

[Richard Hughes]

On Tue, 2008-02-12 at 01:35 +0530, Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray wrote:
> 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.

Yup.

> 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.

Ahh, excellent. Cheers for joining the list, now we have all the main
players :-)

> 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.

Okay, a yumpack is just a tarball? Why did you choose to compress them
this way out of interest?

> 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?

Sure, it would be great to work with you on this. What are the primary
use cases fulfilled by Opyum - service packs, offline install or a
combination of them both?

Richard