[packagekit] abrt and pk-debuginfo-install

[Richard Hughes]

Recently I've been looking at the abrt project. It's looking pretty
good so far, with one exception: Currently they install the debugging
packages using the Fedora script debuginfo-install, and scrape the
standard out for errors, and inject to standard in an unconditional
'Y' to anything that looks like a question. The script is also used by
gdb to ask the user to install certain debuginfo packages. Not ideal.

Now, some explaining. Fedora stores debuginfo packages in separate
debuginfo repositories. This means the install-debuginfo script has to
enable sources, get the deps of the packages to install, and install
as many of the debuginfo packages as it can find, and then disable the
sources it enabled. This is all horribly Fedora specific, and of
course has to be done as root.

For a cool trick, I've make a PackageKit version of this script,
called pk-install-debuginfo. It does exactly the same thing as the
Fedora debuginfo-install script, but runs as the user and uses all the
PK methods underneath the hood. So in theory pk-install-debuginfo
would run on Kubuntu or on Foresight (or the others too) with a little
tweaking.

Except it won't, as other distros do things differently. I'm guessing
some store the debuginfo files in the main repositories (and hence no
sources need to be enabled), and some others call the files -dbg
rather than -debuginfo. So now I need your help. If your distro does
things differently from the Fedora way, please tell me how, and I'll
add support for it in pk-install-debuginfo.

Of course, if the sources are signed and no repos need to be enabled,
then things just install without authentication. This is how it's
supposed to work. I'll be adding a man page and a config file for
pk-install-debuginfo soon.

Of course, if you don't like the idea, just pass
--disable-debuginfo-install to the configure script when compiling
PackageKit. Comments welcome.

Richard.