[packagekit] Properties and Supported

[Robin Norwood]

On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 18:07:25 +0100
Sebastian Heinlein <glatzor at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> Am Freitag, den 15.02.2008, 15:00 +0000 schrieb Richard Hughes:
> > On Fri, 2008-02-15 at 08:57 +0100, Sebastian Heinlein wrote:
> > > have you already thought about implementing a common GetProperty
> > > method in PackageKit? There are always special needs by
> > > distributions, e.g. support life time of a package.
> > 
> > I think a general getter is too loose in API definition. What
> > parameters do you want to get at per-package?
> 
> I would like to have origin, licence, support, section, tags,
> supported mime-types and codecs.
> 
> Why did you decide to hardcode the list of groups? Should the
> frontends not be able to deal with flexible groups/sections?
> 
> > > It would be nice to have a supported and third party filter in
> > > PackageKit. But this could also be decided in the frontend.
> > 
> > Can you define supported and third-party for a general case? Then
> > we can work on how these filters could map to others like yum
> > (where livna is unsupported) in a more general sense.
> > 
> > But overwise, adding more filters is a good thing to do.
> 
> This issue affects mainly company driven distributions that don't
> make a difference between a professional and community edition, e.g.
> Canonical/Ubuntu.
> 
> Canonical only provides support for a 'small' number of packages that
> are located in the main component and the software from the partner
> repository. Furthermore desktop packages are only supported for 3
> years and server packages for 5 years in a Long Term Release. Hardy
> 8.04 will be such a LTS release. The software in universe is
> basically maintained by the community and so not officially supported
> by Canonical.
> 
> In Ubuntu we mark applications that are not officially part of Ubuntu
> as third party applications. This helps to promote software from the
> partner repository and also allows user to easily identify alien
> software that could also be a source of problems.

How is that implemented, out of curiosity?  In Fedora/rpm terms, we
have a 'Packager' string and a 'Vendor' string, but so far as I'm
aware, none of our tools use them, and they are both set to
'Fedora Project' by our build system.  I don't think they're currently
used by much, or enforced at all, but one or both of these sound
equivalent to the concept you're describing in Ubuntu.  A quick glance
at the livna-release rpm (livna is sort of like ubuntu's universe, but
not officially pointed to by Fedora because they provide some 'not
free/possibly illegal for Fedora to distribute' software) shows:

Packager    : rpm.livna.org <http://bugzilla.livna.org>
Vendor: rpm.livna.org

So at first glance it looks like that data might be useful for PK to
show in Fedora as well.

-RN

-- 
Robin Norwood
Red Hat, Inc.

"The Sage does nothing, yet nothing remains undone."
-Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching