[packagekit] ALPM Backend

[Richard Hughes]

On Mon, 2008-09-01 at 20:57 +0200, Georg Grabler wrote:
> 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.

Right.

> 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.

Right, so you are reading and writing repo 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.

Indeed, making abstract methods for this would be a giant waste of time
-- and there's no need to.

> What would be the perefered way?

Well, at the moment there is RepoSetData [1] which allows you to set
backend specific strings using the PackageKit API. There's currently no
RepoGetData function, as I figured it wouldn't be needed.

What exact data are you trying to get and set?

> 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.

You've seen KPackageKit[2], right?

Richard.

[1] http://www.packagekit.org/gtk-doc/Transaction.html#Transaction.RepoSetData
[2] http://www.packagekit.org/pk-screenshots.html#kde