[packagekit] Apt backend - PkPackageId annoyance

[Richard Hughes]

On Fri, 2008-06-06 at 19:57 +0200, Patrick Niklaus wrote:
> I recently had a look at the apt (== apt2) backend in packagekit. It
> seems that fetching details of packages does not work correctly - at
> least pk-application crashes when you click on an installed packages.

Crashing is never good, apologies. There's a couple of bugfixes in git
master that might fix this. If you can get a backtrace I can be sure.

> I'm currently trying to investigate this problem. It seems that the
> PkPackageId->data (ident->data) block in gpk_application_details_cb is
> NULL. The function compares ident->data with "installed" (which of
> courses returns FALSE) and thus assumes that the package is not
> installed.

ident->data should never be NULL - I can add checks in the daemon for
this and provide a warning for the future.

> Which brings up the question how to generate the package id
> appropriate. Looking at get_id_from_package in aptDBUSBackend.py
> brings up the following line:
> 
> if installed == False and pkg.isInstalled:
>     ....
> 
> Somehow I fail to understand why installed must be False and
> pkg.isInstalled True. Can someone give me a hint here?

Seb?

> Also, what is the last data field of the package ID
> (name;version;arch;data) supposed to contain? The repository name?

Lots of data here:
http://www.packagekit.org/pk-reference.html#introduction-ideas-packageid

Yell if it's still unclear and I'll explain some more data.

Richard.