[packagekit] Packagekit and Ubuntu

[Richard Hughes]

2009/9/16 Matthias Klumpp <matthias at nlinux.org>:
> Yes, this is the problem! Also user may want to install packages with
> pkcon.

If a user has to drop to a command line tool to install something,
then we're doing something very wrong with the GUIs. Admins are
already familar with apt-get, yum etc, and can use those much faster
and more efficiently than an abstract tool.

> What do you do if an application which the users wants to install
> via a GUI interface depends e.g. on MySQL?

Okay, lets say for instance that a user wants to install the GIMP,
that depends on MySQL. Why should the user (who wants to install a
graphics program) want to configure the MySQL admin password? I can
understand that GIMP may depend on MySQL-libs, but that's a client
library and thus doesn't need a password for the server.

What's very wrong with choosing the default option, and just providing
a bubble saying "We've installed new software using the defaults.
Click _here_ for more information" after the installation? 99% of
users won't click the link, and stuff "just works" by default.

Also, I would love some of you that want this extended functionality
to actually provide suggestions on how to fix this. At the moment it's
rather like this in my head:

debian: We can't use PackageKit because it doesn't do X.
me: If you do X then you destroy all the use cases PackageKit is
working towards.
debian: But we need feature X
me: If you code feature X so it doesn't break the use cases, and so
that other distros can use it then I'll accept it.
debian: It's too hard to fix. We can't use PackageKit.

Maybe a massive generalisation, but that's how I'm seeing it right
now. I would love to be proved wrong.

Richard.