[packagekit] Auto Installed Packages

[Thomas Wood]

Getting back to this thread as we never quite reached a conclusion...


On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 15:55 -0800, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> On 19:45 Thu 31 Jan     , Richard Hughes wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 11:30 -0800, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> > > Gentoo's package managers already implement that. It takes a little 
> > > while to do the calculation in pkgcore (~1 minute for ~1000
> > > packages). 
> > > Seems like a PM-level thing that PK would just provide a frontend for.
> > 
> > Do you mean a CleanupPackages function, or doing it automatically per
> > package remove?
> 
> Hmmm. Dependency cleaning seems like part of package removal, so it 
> makes sense to do it there.
> 
> > If it's the latter, it's easy to add a flag to the RemovePackage thing
> > like I suggested before. What we might want to do is prompt the user if
> > this is okay, in which case we would need to do something cleverer.
> > 
> > If prompting the user isn't that important (and personally I don't think
> > it is) then we can use this easily.
> 
> I can imagine PMs making errors in finding "unneeded" packages. OTOH, 
> I'm unsure PK's target audience would understand enough to know an error 
> was made, and I'm unsure it's PK's problem to deal with PM bugs.

I agree about the target audience, but I also don't think this is a
decision the backend plugin should make. Instead the decision on whether
to "autoremove" packages should be in the front end. It would then also
be up to the front end to decide whether to present this option to the
user.

So basically, I'm asking if we can add an additional boolean argument to
the remove_package() method to enable or disable this feature.

e.g. pk_client_remove_package (PkClient, *client,
                               const gchar *package,
                               gboolean allow_deps,
                               gboolean remove_orphaned);

What do people think?

Regards,

Thomas

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