[packagekit] Debconf and PackageKit Was Re: Packagekit and Ubuntu

[Sebastian Heinlein]

Hello,

I have made up this plan to integrate debconf and conf file conflicts
into PackageKit. These issues will be handled during a running
transaction which will paused while waiting for an answer from the
user - new transaction will be blocked so long. To avoid an endless 
block the caller-active property and a time out will be used.

Config file conflicts and debconf have to be dealt during the running
transaction, since we have to make sure that daemons start with the
correct configuration and maintainer scripts cannot be safely
suspended or killed.

Conflict file handling:

If the backend recognizes a conf file conflict, pauses the transaction
and reports this to the packagekit daemon. The daemon checks if the
caller is still active. If so it sends a ConfigFileConlift signal with
the old and new file as attributes. The user would call a
ResolveConfigFileConflict method with the new file or possible
predefined values like "keep" or "replace". The daemon sends the
answer to the backend.
If the caller is no longer available on the bus the daemon will report
this to the backend, which will choose a default action.

Debconf:

Would be basically the same as for config file conflicts. We could
use the proxy debconf frontend. This allows to communicate with
debconf using a socket. The backend would listen on the socket and
behave like a normal debconf frontend. A configuration question would
be send to the backend and from the daemon to the user using a signal.
The signal would need some further thinking since there are different
kind of possible questions e.g. yes/no, lists. See above for answer and 
caller-active handling.

A further issue is the communication with the backend. Currently we
cannot access the caller-active property from a spawned backend.
Should we send this information to the backend or limit this advanced
features to native backends?

Cheers,

Sebastian
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