[packagekit] Packagekit and Ubuntu

Matthias Klumpp matthias at nlinux.org
Wed Sep 16 08:30:25 PDT 2009


>> We could change things such that we knew up front that a EULA would be
>> needed, but it would be a fair chunk of work. Where do you actually
>> store the EULAs? Or are they in the package and you download it,
discover
>> them and restart at that point?
> 
> Well, the dummy backend does this, but I would imagine that other
> backends would download the package file, decompress it and then abort
> and ask for the eula to be agreed to. The alternative is to store the
> whole EULA in the metadata, which might not be palatable. Each EULA
> has a unique ID, and so it's possible for the backend to know which
> prompt has then been agreed to.
> 
> I can do an example diagram if that would be clearer.

I thin the problem to ask users to accept an EULA is just a minor problem.
(you can accept it while executing the script and ask it afterwards, if
this is no violation against the EULA)
A lot more important is the problem how to handle other dialogs, what
Daniel Nicoletti mentioned before. E.g. MySQL needs a root-password while
installing and some other packages ask the user to restart some system
daemons. (And if modified a configfile should be overwritten with a newer
version there's also a user request)
Those questions require immediate action by the user and cannot be stored
somewhere.

 Matthias

P.S: It would be great if PackageKit would print the errors thrown by the
backend in the error-log too. I think this is what Debian maintainers
criticize about PackageKit.



More information about the PackageKit mailing list