[packagekit] Keep trace of dilectly installed packages

Mounir Lamouri mounir.lamouri at gmail.com
Fri Jun 5 01:40:07 PDT 2009


Hi,

portage has a "world" list that is actually a list of directly
installed packages. As Gentoo is source based, it's designed to be
able to update only directly installed packages and then update
dependencies. In other words, if libfoo is updated, if you do a basic
update, it will not install the new version but if some random app
using libfoo you installed is updated, this app will be updated so
libfoo will.
This is particularly useful because Gentoo, as a source based
distribution, doesn't have releases that pulls new packages, updates
are continuous.
This list is also used to clean the system by removing every package
not in the list nor depends from a package in the list.

If packagekit doesn't manage this list, I will have to choose between:
- do not add installed packages to the world list and if someone tries
to clean his system (with portage) it will remove everything
- add every installed packages to the list but it will make the world
list overflowed and could be very bad for system healness
You will admit none of these solutions are good.

I think this feature is not difficult to add to PackageKit. When
clicking to install a package, this package should be keeped to be
added as the installed packages and others as dependencies. We only
need to make a good specification.

Do you think this feature can be added to packagekit ?

Thanks,
Mounir


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