[packagekit] Keep trace of dilectly installed packages

[Richard Hughes]

On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 2:42 PM, Mounir Lamouri<mounir.lamouri at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry, I must be not clear enough. My question was not about what recursive does
> but when recursive=True is used and when recursived=False is used. As
> get-depends is for information, I can't see when recursived=True is necessary.

Say for instance you're installing openoffice on your computer.
Openoffice depends on jade, which isn't installed. Jade depends on
xmlto which isn't installed either.

You do GetDepends(openoffice,recursived=False) and get:
jade

You do GetDepends(openoffice,recursived=True) and get:
jade
xmlto

So if you specify recursive TRUE, you can get all the packages that
would have to be downloaded for the package to be installed, and so we
can show a "234Mb additional packages will have to be downloaded also"
message to the user.

If we specify recursive FALSE, then we only return jade, which is
useful to find out dependencies of packages, so that you could for
example do a graph of what is required by what. Most often the
PackageKit tools specify recursive TRUE, as they either want to know
what would have to be removed (GetRequires) or installed (GetDepends)
for a transaction.

I hope this makes things clearer. Yell if you still stuck.

Richard.