[packagekit] Wishlist for API breaks

[James Antill]

On Sun, 2008-10-26 at 17:11 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-10-24 at 11:28 -0400, James Antill wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-10-24 at 15:16 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > > Do any of you have any other things on the wishlist?
> > 
> >  There's the install+remove operation, which I think requires a break?
> 
> Do we want an InstallRemove function or something more abstract like:
> 
> SwapPackages(sendmail, postfix)

 This doesn't solve the generic problem of wanting to install pacakges
X, Y and Z while removing packages A, B and C. I'm also fearful of what
the UI would look like for SwapPackages().

> As we want to swap the packages, not just do random things. I think the
> UI would get very muddled if we let the users do both actions at once,

 The UI goes to extra lengths to be more muddled now, as it has to treat
the first operation as "special" and turn off half of the UI ... I fail
to see how not confusing the user by doing that is going to be worse.

> and I think it would be pretty hard for backends to say "we support
> these actions with these other actions (nxn)" and also do the ordering
> correctly.

 It's not "install operations" and "remove operations" in most of the
backends, it's just a transaction ... so *shrug*.

> >  And maybe a more advanced search call?
> 
> What scope did you think of the search call? Is this something we can
> achieve with the existing search-details?

 Currently the "search box" is a simple mapping to the PK API, which is
very far from what any user wants IMNSHO.
 The ideal UI should be more like the url bar in firefox, where
something entered into it would match against "yum list foo" and "yum
search foo" (with the sections of the later split out).

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora