[packagekit] FOSScamp discussion notes

[James Westby]

On Fri, 2008-05-23 at 11:28 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-05-23 at 11:30 +0200, Sebastian Heinlein wrote:
> > In Ubuntu apt url was introduced. If you click on an url e.g.
> > apt://packagekit an installer will start and install packagekit from
> > the Ubuntu repositories.
> 
> Yes I like that too. I think that could be extended like I've said in
> the past to "click this link to install everything you need to get
> started hacking evince" which would pull in all the deps and packages in
> a cross distro way.

I think this is a good idea. Having the "install the package" link
working would be good enough, and shouldn't be too much work to extend
as you wish.

There are two things that I would like to discuss first though. Firstly,
if I were to say

  Install DeviceKit by clicking <a href="pk://DeviceKit">here</a>

then it probably wouldn't work on Debian based systems, as I presume
it will be called "devicekit". This has come up before, and the solution
is to have the person providing the link (or the program in the case
of something like jockey installing driver packages), so you could
have

  Install DeviceKit by clicking one of the links below

    Fedora: <a href="pk://DeviceKit">DeviceKit</a>
    Debian/Ubuntu: <a href="pk://devicekit">DeviceKit</a>

so this would require the author to go and look up in every distribution
whether they have the package, and what its name is, so uptake may be
slowed.

We could push to have a project name to package name mapping in all
distros that want to support this. The mapping could be any form they
want I guess, as long as it conformed to a couple of rules.

There are some issues with things like name clashes, but perhaps we 
could come up with some way to work around this.

Obviously this sort of thing may take some time to be available across
the board.

The other thing that I'm unsure about is what failure would look like
here. There are several failure cases, for instance not having
the handler for the URL, the package not being available in the 
distribution, and the package being un-installable. The last should
be just the normal PK error I guess, but we would want to make sure
that the other cases are handled as well as possible. For instance
providing a search box in the second case, or perhaps a way to
file a "needs-packaging" bug.

I don't think any of this should necessarily stop us from moving
towards doing it, but I think it's important to make sure there
is a good user experience for everyone involved.

Thanks,

James