[packagekit] WhatProvides

[Bastien Nocera]

On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 20:07 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 19:58 +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > But at the same time that not a problem for PackageKit to deal with,
> > but for distribution developers (and users of their "provides"
> > scripts) to figure out.
> 
> Bastien, do you think that:
> gstreamer0.10(decoder-audio/mpeg)(layer=(int)1)()(64bit) should be a
> standard or do you think this should be done per-distro?

It's definitely a per-distro (or at least per packaging backend)
problem. I'm pretty sure some backends would allow special knowledge of
the gstreamer provides, and would be able to do something cleaner. Some
distributions don't have multilib support, etc.

We don't have the same library provides across packaging backends, I
don't see why codec provides should be any different.

> Do you think we could make this a formal standard for backends? Too high
> effort/benefit ration?

See the library provides mention above.

Also, think of running PackageKit on Solaris. What happens when their
modalias format doesn't match the one used for Linux, or a packaging
backend doesn't allow for a free-form string...

IMO, this is too much work considering the benefits.