[packagekit] Packagekit and Ubuntu

[Sebastian Heinlein]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 09:05:52AM +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> 2009/9/15 Jean Hubbard <jean_p57 at hotmail.com>:
> > I recently submitted a bug report requesting that Ubuntu Software
> > Store(AppCenter) use/be based on Packagekit instead of gnome-app-install.
> > Pretty much replace packagekit-gnome with this AppCenter thing i guess.
> 
> Well, Ubuntu are free to do whatever they like. It's disappointing,
> but it's getting to be a re-occurring story I'm afraid.

Actually Ubuntu Software Store doesn't use gnome-app-install, but
aptdaemon as installation backend. The application data is stored in a
Xapian database created from the desktop files, which are shared with
gnome-app-install.

> > " Thanks for your bugreport.
> > We would love to use packagekit, but it does not support debconf or conffile
> > prompting. We attempted to contribute those missing features and
> > unfortunately they were not accepted on the ground that a packagekit
> > transaction can not be interrupted (for something like debconf or conffile
> > handling). This is a important feature for us and without it, e.g. sun-java
> > packages do not install."
> 
> This isn't true at all. Transactions can be stopped and re-started
> with different options (see
> http://www.packagekit.org/gtk-doc/introduction-ideas-transactions.html#introduction-ideas-transactions-sig-install
> for how all this works) and questions can be put to the user. We
> already do that for EULAs, GPG keys and extended authentication
> prompts. I'm just not letting a random script ask the user random
> non-localised questions. I am happy to add any number of questions, as
> long as they are abstracted out in a nice way that other distributions
> can use.
> 
> We need someone interested in this to actually write some code, rather
> than just decide it's "too hard" and run away and write more code that
> will be obsolete (in my opinion) in a few years anyway. If anyone
> actually wants to implement this, I've written quite a lot about it on
> the mailing lists, or I would happy to discuss things in person, on a
> conf call, or even in IRC.

Stopping the transaction in the case of debconf question just doesn't work.
We don't have got a possibility to collect all questions before we
run the actual maintainer scripts, since the question could be asked
only in certain situation which are detected in the maintainer
scripts. So we would have to kill the maintainer scripts while running
as soon as a question appears.
In the case of e.g. data migrations done in the postinst script this seems 
to be a quite dangerous operation. So actually we face a policy and not a
coding problem.

Possible config file changes can be mostly detected before installing as
already done in the Debian software unattended-upgrades.

Cheers,

Sebastian
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