[packagekit] Apt-Dispatcher Branch

[Sebastian Heinlein]

Hello,

I converted the APT backend to a spawned one. The work can be found in
the apt-dispatcher branch, which I would like to merge soon.

The main reason are the current problems with the long time it can take
to process the synchronous calls to the backend. Since Kubuntu now makes
use of PackageKit I see the "backend should fork" bug report more often
recently, which also appears after raising the time out to a full second
and on modern hardware. I suspect a disk I/O issue, since this problem
also occurs in my virtual machines - but only very seldom and I cannot
reproduce it.

An alternative would be to improve the backend mechanism and switch to
asynchronous calls. But on the other hand it feels strange to be the
single user of a backend type.

Last but not least, there is a small design issue in the dbus backend
mechanism: it assumes that the backend is alive all the time and that
Init was called on it. So it would be required to set the locale and
proxy for each transaction.

I am open to advice.

Cheers,

Sebastian
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: Dies ist ein digital signierter Nachrichtenteil
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/packagekit/attachments/20090406/4f446622/attachment-0004.pgp>