[packagekit] Implementation of searchFiles in APT backend

[Sebastian Heinlein]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 08:18:12PM +0200, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> Hello!
> I'm the author of the Listaller toolset. [1]
> This project uses PackageKit to communicate with the package management
> system of the current distribution. It is essential for us to use
> searchFile for not installed packages, so we can find the required packages
> for a binary or script.
> Unfortunately this function needs extra-data on Debian based distros (I
> asked this some time ago [2]).
> So I included an apt-file based workaround to our PackageKit interface, so
> it now works. But I would like to see those option in PackageKit too,
> because I don't like this hack.
> I am not a very experienced Python programmer (I do not really like
> Python), but I can program in C++. Would it be accepted if I build a patch
> for the APT-Backend which uses the apt-file tool do detect the dependency,
> if apt-file is present? Or should I better add the function directly to a
> backend? (Apt-file is written in Perl, I never wrote any line in Perl)
> (This would require a flag to activate download of apt-files's extra data)
> Which backend is the "best" at time? We have the APT-Python backend and
> APTCC. Last time I heard that APTCC will implement the changes made on
> Debian's debconf very fast, also there is active development on this
> backend. But APT is default on Kubuntu...
> I hope you can help me with my questions!

I haven't seen any code of the debconf part yet, but it should also be
implementable in the python based backend.

Since PolicyKit-1 isn't available in KDE/Kubuntu yet I focused on the
0.4.x series of PackageKit. But Lucid will very likely ship with 0.5,
so I am going to catch up with the new features soon.

How does your workaround work? Do you just run "apt-file -N -l search
PATH"? This should not be hard to implement. But how do you handle
apt-file update? Should this happen after every cache update?

Cheers,

Sebastian
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