[packagekit] Packagekit and Ubuntu

[Sebastian Heinlein]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 05:16:12PM +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> 2009/9/15 Matthias Klumpp <matthias at nlinux.org>:
> > 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.
> 
> So what does java-runtime actually need to do, just show a EULA?
> Surely you know about this before you've installed the package?

The problem is how to detect a debconf question that is an EULA? This
could be done using a whitelist or by a naming convention. But it
would require to extract and get the information from the package file
outside of APT.

By the way the Debian Policy even discourages to use debconf for EULA
questions. But I am not sure if there will be a change in Debian to
introduce an EULA mechanism at all - since this helps to propagate
proprietary software.

But the best solution would be to just show the EULA at the first
start to each user. Can a sys admin agree to an EULA for another user?
But this requires changes by upstream.

> > P.S: I think the Ubuntu project has a good reason not to use PackageKit for
> > SoftwareStore with this.
> 
> I'm not sure I agree, as all it would take to make installing java on
> Ubuntu a possibility would be to hook up the Eula callbacks.
> 
> > Canonical has only a few employees who focus on
> > Ubuntu development and have less time to participate in upstream projects.
 
Canonical != Ubuntu. There is also a community in Ubuntu. Canonical
could hire a developer whenever they would like - they just have other
priorities. But the community lacks human resources - especially
coders. Which isn't curios for a distribution. Kubuntu ships
PackageKit by default but they don't have got the man power to work on
PackageKit. They did some work on Kpackagekit. But AFAIK mainly
integration work.

> My personal view is that Canonical needs to recognise that Ubuntu is
> made from Linux, not the other way around. But that's way off topic
> for this mailing list.

Oh, it's not only an Ubuntu thing. PackageKit isn't currently 
available in Debian. There are strong feelings against PackageKit
in the Debian community - PackageKit per se would violate the
Debian Policy.

Cheers,

Sebastian
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