[packagekit] FOSScamp discussion notes

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2008-05-28 at 16:09 +0200, Stanislav Visnovsky wrote:
> 1-click gives the user ability to decide enabling additional repo. 
> Distribution does not care where the repository is coming from, this is fully 
> under control of the user and defined by the provider of 1-click URL.

Some people (and I am one of them) might argue this is pretty harmful
since this is a great way for users to experience RPM hell (since it's a
pretty well-known fact that 3rd party repos tend to do that).

Actually, by that logic, one could actually argue that people pimping
3rd party repos (such as the SUSE build service) aren't exactly doing
people a favor. Maybe short-term though, but (and pardon for the
graphical analogy) it's kinda like pissing in your pants if you're
freezing: it's nice and warm the first few minutes (yay, I can install
this or that app) but longer term it's a pretty bad idea (ugh, why are
there conflicts when updating?). I'm sure 3rd party repos mean well
though. And sometimes these 3rd party repos are necessary for users
because some distros refuse to ship non-free software etc. 3rd party
repos aren't going away.

So I think it'd be much better to get the package from the distro
itself and we should encourage that. So if I were to design a
1-click-ish scheme, it would look like this

 <oneclick>
    <os flavor="Fedora">
      <package>Frobnicator</package>
      <package>Frobnicator-extras</package>
      <package optional="true" repo="livna" repourl="http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-$osversion.rpm">Frobnicator-extras-nonfree</package>
    </os>
    <os flavor="Debian">
      <!-- Debian people can't stand CamelCase and their packaging is more fine grained -->
      <package>frobnicator</package>
      <package>frobnicator-essentials</package>
      <package>frobnicator-extras</package>
      <package optional="true" repo="non-free" repourl="http://somewhere.on.the.net/blah">frobnicator-extras-nonfree</package>
    </os>
  </oneclick>

along with other stuff. Of course, this format is just what I could
think of in five minutes.. the XML schema would need a lot of work. The
handler for this type of file (e.g. PackageKit) could even integrate
with distro specific wishlists a'la

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WishList

or it could file bugs etc. That way e.g. Fedora maintainers can see that
lots of their users wants to install some program. That is a motivation
for these guys to package it up. 

      David