[packagekit] WhatProvides

[Richard Hughes]

On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 18:52 +0100, Klaus Kaempf wrote:
> Whats the purpose of having an enum if its semantics could be encoded
> in 'data' ?

Valid point, but I felt it was better to split out the type in a
separate data flag to avoid parsing in the daemon. Plus it makes
filtering easier, but I don't think that would be a common case.

Ohh, and we probably need a filter parameter to WhatProvides too, as we
really don't want to filter this on the frontend.

> > I guess we could standardize the format for MODALIAS and CODEC although
> > i don't think that's particularly important as we don't enforce the
> > names of packages either.
> 
> Correct. Leave this standardization to the package maintainers.
> PackageKit would push this by requiring 'standardized' capabilities
> like e.g. 'modalias(...)' through the WhatProvides API.

What about using the pre-defined types (e.g. MODALIAS) where we define a
common specification, and just use GENERAL when we pass free text to the
backends?

Richard.