[packagekit] Packagekit and Ubuntu

[Matthias Klumpp]

> 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

True. I also recognized this problem on Debian/Ubuntu with pacakges which
depend on Java-Runtime.
It would be great if there's a solution for this issue.
(Maybe add an exception for Debian packages or, as very last option, ask
the Debian project to release some extra specs for maintainer script
question handling within the next deb specification)
I use aptdaemon as workaround for this problem in my software too...

 Matthias

P.S: I think the Ubuntu project has a good reason not to use PackageKit for
SoftwareStore with this. And Ubuntu developers participate in various
upstream projects, but Canonical has only a few employees who focus on
Ubuntu development and have less time to participate in upstream projects.
I am sure this will change if Canonical makes more profit with Ubuntu. (As
Novell and Red Hat do)