[packagekit] pk-extra help

[Richard Hughes]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Ken VanDine <ken at vandine.org> wrote:
> It looks like pk-extra doesn't handle metadata like categories.  Am I
>  right?  It would love to have it extended to cache all the package
>  metadata.  Can someone describe out to use it?

I'm away from my PC for all of easter for family stuff, but I'll
quickly explain how I see the server metadata vs. client metadata
should work.

I think the server metadata should explain what about the packages
makes sense to put into the repository, so for example the fedora
metadata exports the severity of the update, but does not export the
icon name of the package.

Where the client tools need this extra information, and additional
heuristics are needed (e.g scanning desktop files) then I think it's
sane to abstract this into a framework, which is where PkExtra sits.

Therefore, PkExtra should no cache every part of package metadata (in
my opinion, although I would be willing to discuss this requirement)
and probably only do the bits that the backend can't do, things like
localisation and icon names and trivial things like that.

Richard.