[packagekit] User Interaction needed

[Richard Hughes]

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 16:59 +0100, Stefan Haas wrote:
> there are a lot of places where it would be very useful (at least in the
> zypp-backend) to have any kind of possibility to interact with the user
> (like the already discussed media change issue).

What kind of interaction? I've specified before in
http://www.packagekit.org/pk-faq.html that mandatory general input is a
very bad thing to do to be able to meet our primary use cases. Could you
specify a list of questions you need to ask the user?

As for the media query, I think it's sane to do this at the beginning of
a transaction if required, but I really don't think we can ask the user
to change CD's half way through. For example:

pkcon install openoffice
installing openoffice-bin
installing openoffice-common
installing openoffice-clipart
>Please insert CDROM 2 for extra packages to be installed

Now, what if I can't find CDROM 2 at this point? The transaction is half
finished... Does zypp then rollback the changes as if the first CD had
not been inserted? Or are the files copied off disk first and then the
transaction run? If the latter is true then we can do this as part of
the checks for the transaction, although we would have to requeue this
twice in the client tool.

> Another issue: When you've to choose between methods of resolution while
> installing/removing/updating a package (assumed there is no simple way
> to just do it), the zypp-backend  simply fails at the moment.

You mean if there are two packages both with a virtual provide, which
does the backend choose? You have to bear in mind: does the user
_actually_ care? Think primary use cases rather than a replacement to
the zypp command line tool.

> What do you think?
> How do you do it in the other backends?

In yum there is a dedicated key-required signal that is used when the
transaction is being setup, but I don't know if any other of the
backends support this.

Richard.