[packagekit] Regarding updating packages using Packagekit

[Richard Hughes]

On Mon, 2009-02-02 at 00:09 +0530, Ashwini Dhiman wrote:
> As of now, it seems that every time we launch gnome-packagekit from
> the in Fedora, it has to query and ask for the packagelist from the
> internet. On the other hand, if the list once downloaded, if saved on
> the user's computer can make it available to him/her on opening
> gnome-packagekit (just like synaptic package manager in Ubuntu). This
> would enable the user to view the list of available packages even when
> offline.

Well, we already do cache the update list, but we don't cache the
details. As soon as you start caching this level of detail it makes it
very hard to ensure cache-consistency. Also, the daemon quits after a
few minutes to save resources, and so the update list is then lost.

> Also, when downloading packages packagekit downloads the packages from
> one mirror. Can it be done so that a package and its dependencies be
> simultaneously downloaded from multiple mirrors, also considering the
> bandwidth and probably saving time. This idea originates from the fact
> that most download managers create multiple port connections to enable
> fast downloads. Thus if packagekit is made to download using multiple
> ports, maybe the downloading can be made faster.

Well, this is possible in the backend, but I don't think any package
manager supports this parallel mode of operation. There's actually some
code in git (I forget which branch) that expands the API to cope with
multiple sub-transactions overlapping, but that branch is quite old now.
I'm not sure how much the GUI does the right thing in this case.

Richard.