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

[Richard Hughes]

On Wed, 2008-11-26 at 15:11 +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Hi Richard,
> 
> Richard Hughes [2008-11-26 13:23 +0000]:
> > I'm not sure what questions you would ever need to ask for jockey. Have
> > you got any examples?
> 
> Indeed I try hard to not ask any in jockey, I just got a bug report
> about the fglrx driver, which failed to install because of a conffile
> question (which obviously can't be answered, since the jockey backend
> runs noninteractively -- pretty much the same problem as in PK
> itself). Those kinds of things can and should be fixed in the driver
> packages, though.

Agreed.

> The only real question I ever needed to ask was for installing the
> firmware for the b43 kernel module; while the kmod itself is free and
> shipped upstream, the firmware isn't freely redistributable, and thus
> you have to provide a source for b43-fwcutter (MacOS or driver CD, or
> a download URL).

Right, ideally we can do this in an abstract way and get the GTK file
chooser dialog for GNOME and the KDE one for KDE. I don't think asking
the user for a path is the right thing to do.

> Of course I can ask a custom-coded question before
> installing the driver, but I'd much rather use the already existing
> packaging scripts from the b43-fwcutter package (which use debconf).

Right. Can you query the package before you install it to find out the
questions you need answering?

In this way we can handle this in PackageKit (and session tools) and I
think such a thing would be a good thing to add like the GPG key signing
interaction (after download, before install).

When we have the second pass, I guess we can install the package with a
--firmware-file=/media/DISK/foo.fw switch and be silent. Would that work
for you?

> So far this isn't blocking me enough to not use PK in Jockey (just
> that silly dbus-glib bug [1] is driving me mad and prevents me from
> using PK with its full capabilities).

That sucks -- I know not enough about dbus-glib to help on this one,
sorry :-(

Richard.