[packagekit] Wishlist for API breaks

[Richard Hughes]

On Mon, 2008-10-27 at 09:44 -0400, James Antill wrote:
> 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().

Sure, it was meant as a RFC, not a concrete proposal :-)

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

Sure, but do users understand transactions? Users know how to remove and
create, but do they expect to do both at the same time? The more I think
about this, the more I think such corner cases just need to just to the
native tool (yum, apt-get etc) on the command line. Not everybody is
going to want to replace a mail server in their lifetime.

> > >  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).

Hmm, I'm not sure about splitting this -- that would be two transactions
from a PK POV, and probably be difficult to encode into a sane UI.

Richard.