[packagekit] portage backends filters

[Richard Hughes]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 10:22 PM, Mounir
Lamouri<mounir.lamouri at gmail.com> wrote:
> And the interesting part it's the packages I'm not really sure about:
> - arch: according to filters doc [1], it's for multilib support (x86-64
> using x86) but it's not managed like that in Gentoo. So we can use it to
> "unmask" not keyworded files or use unstable packages. But as it's not
> really done for that.

If I'm sitting on a x86-64 PC, I could install dave.x64 or dave.i386.
If the arch filter is specified, then I only get the native
architecture packages, for example dave.x64. This means that we can
DTRT in 99% of automatically-install cases, unless the user wants to
install the 32bit plugin, in which case they probably know they don't
want a native arch.

> - visible: not really clear what it should be. I was thinking it could
> be used to unmask some packages.

You probably don't need this. This is designed to be used where you
were sitting on a smartphone, and you want to only show totem and
mplayer, and not mplayer-libs, libplparser, totem-playlists etc.
Visible packages would be manually tagged by a repository manager.

> For packagekit-list member, I'm sorry this message is pretty
> portage-oriented. It's much more for your information and to have some
> clarifications about some filters and have some opition. Especially Zac one.

Don't apologise. Discussing the concepts of filters with a bias on
portage probably affects conary or yum too, so really don't worry.

Richard