[packagekit] ALPM Backend

[Georg Grabler]

Hello,

I've had a look at the current implementation of ALPM, and the ALPM Backend
in PackageKit. It seems, as if several functions are missing, especially all
functions needing interaction with the Repositories (downloading and
syncing).

Now, to clarify the "arch" point of view:
The Lib (libalpm) shall not care about any configuration or configuration
file handling. Therefore, the packagemanagers are intended to read the
configuraiton (basically the mirrors, temp dirs, etc), and provide ALPM with
the necessary information.

Now, PackageKit does not support any interface, to apply mirror settings to
the backend (at least I didn't find any similar functionality - I have
confess that I'm quite new to the code of packagekit though). I see two
options for this:
1.) Reading the configuration of the "main" packagemanager "pacman" in arch
linux (/etc/pacman.conf, /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist).
2.) Giving PackageKit the possibility to set mirrors, and to care about this
configuration.

For #1, I'm not sure if this would apply for forks of Arch Linux as well -
probably not.
For #2, quite a lot of configuration can be done. I'm not sure right now,
how many interfaces it would actually need.

What would be the perefered way? We're generally interested in a packagekit
backend, since the developers of the GUI Shaman will be using PackageKit in
version 2 of their package manager GUI (basically the first QT/KDE gui which
did exist for arch linux), to archive the goal of having a KDE package
manager supporting multiple distributions.

Kind regards,
Georg
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