[packagekit] Apt-Dispatcher Branch

[Richard Hughes]

On Mon, 2009-04-06 at 16:54 +0200, Sebastian Heinlein wrote:
> 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.

Merge whenever you like, you're the boss of the apt code.

> 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.

Ouch.

> 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.

Sure, agreed.

> 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.

The daemon should set the proxy and locale data automatically, if they
are different from the last spawned version. This only seems to happen
using fast-user-switching in practice.

Richard.