[packagekit] Cross-distro package mapping and matching?

[Sebastian Heinlein]

Am Sonntag, den 07.06.2009, 11:27 -0500 schrieb Mike McGrath:
> On Sun, 7 Jun 2009, Sebastian Heinlein wrote:
> 
> > Am Sonntag, den 07.06.2009, 03:44 +0200 schrieb Sebastian Pipping:
> >
> > > Git is "dev-util/git" in Gentoo but "git-core" in Debian.
> > > Is there any project/library/tool that does package name mapping?
> > > Is such a service part of or planned for PackageKit?
> >
> > A short summary:
> >
> > There was some discussion about it: Our main use case would have been
> > the installation/removal of extras or plugins by upstream software, e.g.
> > Epiphany installing an extension.
> >
> > It was decided that it is not worth the effort. The mapping of
> > software/packages should be done decentralized by the package
> > maintainers of the corresponding distribution. In the above use case
> > this would mean to patch the names of the to be installed packages in
> > the epiphany package by the maintainer.
> >
> 
> That's good and all but what you've basically done is said "We need this"
> "package maintainers you do this".  There's hundreds if not thousands of
> package maintainers, what is their insentive to do what you're asking?
> What do they get out of it?

In the use case above, this doesn't mean much work - especially compared
to a central catalog. There's only a very small amount of packages
actually allowing to install further software or components. So in the
end this doesn't affect hundreds or thousands of maintainers.

Actually if they don't adapt the package names they will miss a feature.
That is a good motivation.

Cheers,

Sebastian

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