[packagekit] PackageKit & Debian, Was: External dependencies, DeviceKit-power and GNOME Power Manager

[Josselin Mouette]

Summary for packagekit mailing list readers: this thread started on
desktop-devel-list. I was questioning the possibility for Debian to
embrace PackageKit, mostly because of its lack of debconf support.
Richard thought we required a terminal widget, but this is not the case.

Le mardi 25 novembre 2008 à 21:44 +0000, Richard Hughes a écrit :
> > Synaptic won't open a terminal either, except on request, for
> > informational purposes.
> 
> But it's running a hidden VTE widget. As root.

Indeed. But while it was necessary when Synaptic was developed, this is
not the case anymore. Starting from lenny, you’ll never see this
terminal unhide for prompt requests, which means it can be replaced by a
dummy tty.

> "Advanced users can reconfigure packages in a debian specific helper
> program (I'll even ship this in PackageKit in the contrib directory if
> you want)."

This is not a matter of reconfiguring packages - it would be nice to
have, but only as a bonus. This is a matter of not breaking upgrades,
and of following the distribution’s standards.

> > These kinds of little sentences are precisely the hostility I was
> > talking about. You grew hate for the very idea of correctly supporting
> > Debian based on false ideas of what our requirements are, and ignored
> > any further attempts of explanations.
> 
> No, this is not the case at all. This is my last email on this thread.

Fine, let’s switch to a more appropriate mailing list then.

To sum up, the main concern that I have heard from most interested
Debian developers about PK is its lack of support for debconf. If PK was
able to answer to queries from a DBus-based debconf frontend to show the
questions, everything else would be a matter of fixing our tools and a
few broken packages, and of course to improve the backend.

From previous discussions, I understood that you were not willing to
accept patches that would add support for querying the user. If your
mind has evolved on this topic, that would certainly encourage some of
us to code it.

And to make things clear, the intent is certainly not to flood the user
with questions he won’t understand. We continuously hunt abuse of
debconf and remove or lessen the priority of annoying questions.

Cheers,
-- 
 .''`.
: :' :      We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code.
`. `'       We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to
  `-        our own. Resistance is futile.
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