[packagekit] What is PackageKit? A general package management suite? - Take 2

[Richard Hughes]

On 5 March 2010 16:43, Filipus Klutiero <chealer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Working on KPackageKit was discussed as a possible
> replacement for Adept, Synaptic and others.

I think it would be a great shame to try to write a application
installer, now something like PackageKit exists.

> But what needs to be clear before that is the intentions of PackageKit. Does
> PackageKit intend to be a general-purpose or universal layer above libapt's
> layer?

I think you need to try out PackageKit (using something like a Fedora
live CD would be very easy) and then possibly read the developer docs:
http://packagekit.org/gtk-doc/

This will give you a really good idea on what PackageKit is, and what
it's trying to be.

> Should I understand that PackageKit wants to address a limited number of use
> cases? PackageKit seems more focused on creating simple GUI-s than powerful
> GUI-s. Is this just an impression?

Well, it's probably the right impression. People like me just want to
add and remove stuff every now and then, and keep the system up to
date. If you're doing anything much more complicated than that then
you probably ought to be using the command line, and the specific
distro tool. There are tons of things you can do with APT and YUM that
I think would be insane to try to generalize and put in to the PK API.

> Basically, could PackageKit be able to
> downgrade packages, put packages on hold, manage mixed systems and everything,
> or should PackageKit complement more powerful but distribution-specific package
> management front-ends?

Well, PackageKit can downgrade at the moment, but I'm not sure what
you're referring to for the other bits. With PackageKit we're not
trying to wrap all the nuances of all the different tools, as then it
makes designing general purpose UIs really hard. My own feeling is if
you're the kinda person who knows what "pinning" a package is, then
PackageKit will be too "simple" for you.

> There are of course limitations coming from PackageKit being in development.
> I'm not asking about the current features, but about where you want to go.

I don't think we want that much more API in 0.6.x, and the number of
planned API changes is continually reducing. A large chunk of planned
functionality is the debconf support, although I'm not doing that
myself.

I hope that helps,

Richard.