[packagekit] viability of the current yum backend ?

[Tim Lauridsen]

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.
> 
> 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...
> 
> Not that I am volunteering to rearchitect the yum backend, but I think
> it has to be done.
> 
> I wonder what thoughts of the yum people on this are ?
> 

You are right, it sucks to setup yum each time we do some kind of 
packagekit backend action, the way to do it is have some kind of 
persistence yum object loaded one time and let the the helper script 
call it over DBUS.
Another way to speed things up is to let some of the commands take list 
of package id, so we don't have to make some many calls.


Tim