[packagekit] Things that need fixing

[Robin Norwood]

On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:19:34 +0100
Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:

> In no logical order:
[...]

> * Description needs to emit a filter string - this means we can add
> filter types in the future and not break api. This would be something
> like "free;~installed;gui;supported" and allows us to be a lot more
> flexible and clever with a UI. Of course it's optional and we can just
> send "none".

This seems a little funny to me for some reason.  I think it's because
of my background with webapps - for instance, whenever you see someone
putting a bunch of separated values in a single column in a DB table,
you know they're Doing It Wrong.  OTOH, it's nice to be able to pass
additional data around without breaking the API...

[snip more good stuff]

> * Ability to select updates in the update viewer - it would appear
> that davidz was right, as now real world users are asking for it.

Don't tell him, you'll just encourage him.  I think we should add
checkboxes For Now, until someone figures out how to do it better in
various backends.  Then we can add the 'do the right thing' button.

> * We need to pass in string arrays of package_id's to a method so we
> can install, remove or update multiple things in one transaction. We
> need this for the above. We can either do this in a general purpose
> method (so we can do clever stuff as a compound method) or extend the
> existing ones.
> 
> Something like ActionPackage(tid, a(ss)) where a(ss) is array of [role
> and package_id] seems most clean. This way we can do clever stuff (not
> the common case) without breaking all the existing code.

I don't like this at all.  The backend is going to need to handle each
of the possible cases differently, and might not (yet) support a given
action over multiple packages.  With something generic like this,
there's no way to say "I support upgrading, or installing a
bunch of packages, but not downgrading or removing" for instance.

-RN

-- 
Robin Norwood
Red Hat, Inc.

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