[packagekit] Cross-distro package mapping and matching?

[Richard Hughes]

On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 3:47 AM, Mike McGrath<mmcgrath at redhat.com> wrote:
> Not that I'm aware of and I don't believe anything is planned.  We even
> see, rarely, package names that are different between Fedora and
> RHEL/CentOS.

Agree. Even package names change from one version of ubuntu to
another. Packages are split, packages are merged. It's all pretty hard
to keep up with it all.

> I'd almost say don't bother with cross package tracking.  It greatly
> complicates things, increases maintanence costs, and the value you gain
> from it is questionable.  After all, what is in one git package in one
> distro might not match exactly the package in another distro.  Fedora
> packages each nagios-plugin seperately and I don't think any other distros
> do that.  I suspect there are hundreds of examples like this.

Agreed. I don't think there is much to gain from this mapping. I think
there is one way all of this can just work. We search for the binary
name.

Now, this relies on the systems giving things the same binary name
between systems, but this seems to be better than using the package
name.

If you're using the system interface, then you can do
SearchFile(foo,none) and then get the package name. If you're using
the session interface there's even a method to install a package
providing a file.

For instance, installing the package that provides
/usr/include/libnotify/notify.h gets me the right thing on Debian,
Fedora and SUSE. Doing things with a package name just wouldn't work
as well.

Richard.