[packagekit] viability of the current yum backend ?

[Richard Hughes]

On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 14:16 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> Playing around with pk-update-viewer quite a bit in the last few days,
> I have come to seriously doubt that the approach of the current yum
> backend is viable for creating an acceptable user experience. Moving
> the selection up and down in the package list constantly brings up the
> progress bar for multiple seconds. Pup runs circles around
> pk-update-viewer in terms of responsiveness here.

Sure, it's not a smooth process right now.

> Running a separate yum process for each ui action is never going to
> fast enough, and trying to "fix" this by caching in the frontend is
> only going to complicate things further...

Well, what about just modifying the GetUpdateDetail script so that
multiple package_id's can be sent in one transaction (and hence process
invocation). The UpdateDetail signal was designed with this as an
"easy-to-add" option. This would mean we can populate the client
frontend with a single shot (on the first details click, although the
first response would take a little bit longer) and just cache the
details in the PkClient object. I don't think that would be particularly
tricky to add.

> Not that I am volunteering to rearchitect the yum backend, but I think
> it has to be done.

Well, I'm open to ideas. Any idea has to be easy to implement for all
the backends (hence no dbus) and be easily testable.

Richard.