[packagekit] Hello & 2.3 Feedback

[Richard Hughes]

On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 10:26 -0500, Karl Katzke wrote:
> After I posted an entry to my blog yesterday about PackageKit and some
> problems I ran into as a user of Fedora 9, Richard suggested I join in
> and try to help make things a bit better. I appreciate the amount of
> work that has gone into PackageKit and have been impressed by the way
> it allows users to administer their software without causing a lot of
> confusion. 

Cool, thanks for offering your help, I appreciate it.

> I'd also like to help with documentation in a few areas -- the pkcon
> tool (especially man pages), the application itself, and the website.
> I'm a bit new to linux documentation, so I'll need a chance to come up
> to speed -- but there's a bunch of areas where I can see contributions
> to be made, and I'd like to step up where I can. 

Right, it's really just a case of checking the software out with git,
something like:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/packagekit

You then need to look in the man/ directory, where there are pkcon.xml
and pkmon.xml that just need text adding to.

If you do pkcon without any arguments it gives a rough list of what it
supports -- these should be easy to add descriptions for. Some verbage
for the description can be copied from the website I think. I'm really
not sure what belongs in the man page at all.

> Two other unfortunate points with 2.3: 
> - Nebulous: During installation I received some errors that said
> "/usr/lib64/libming.so.0 is not a symlink" to standard error. I'd be
> more precise, but I can't find a record of the error in any logs, and
> it's making me do some serious head scratching. 

Right, you probably need to open a bug in fedora for libming as I just
think this is a packaging (spec file) bug.

> - Debug attached: I experienced a gpk-application crash while the
> program was idling. (Actually, I was reading the fedora-devel list
> when it crashed.) A bug report is attached, although I wasn't running
> it with gdb at the time. I'm now running it in gdb and will post any
> more detailed information as I have the opportunity. It *could* have
> been due to a normal system update I performed just before installing
> it -- I hadn't yet restarted. 

Cool, I saw your backtrace in
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16652 -- I'll have a look
tomorrow morning as I'm at GUADEC now and have cocktails to drink. :-)

Thanks,

Richard.