[packagekit] Service Packs, PackageKit (and Opyum)

[Richard Hughes]

On Tue, 2008-02-12 at 11:11 +0530, Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray wrote:
> >> 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?
> 
> It is an uncompressed tarball. eg., service-pack.tar or yum-pack.tar.
> I chose not to compress them because RPM's are compressed cpio
> archives and in the beginning the added overhead of compressing the
> packs did not look necessary.

Sure, .tar is sane, .tar.gz is not :-)

> > 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?
> 
> Actually a combination of both. You could take a look at my Summer Of
> Code proposal: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SummerOfCode/2007/DebarshiRay
> The "rationale" and "use cases" sections are what you should look at.
> Please ask if something is not clear.

No, looks good. How do you decide which deps are installed on the users
computer? And also what if livna causes a dep failure?

> The one thing which is different from what is written there is the
> fact that Opyum is not a plugin for Pirut. It is a standalone
> application which borrows a lot of code from Pirut (does not use the
> Yum API directly), mostly in the form of the modules exported by Pirut
> in /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages This approach looks sub-optimal to
> me because new Pirut releases often cause Opyum to break; problems in
> the Pirut GUI affect Opyum too; and the application stays locked in
> Fedora-land.

Sure, we need to move this stuff into upstream land :-)

Are you going to FOSDEM this year btw?

Richard.