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

[Filipus Klutiero]

Sorry for breaking the thread, I only subscribed to the digest and don't see any way to reply cleanly.

> 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.

I guess. However, the question we tried to answer is whether Adept development should be continued or another manager created. What is most needed is a good Qt full-fledged package manager.

> > 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.

You answered my question fine, but just FYI, if it interests you, a mixed system is just an install which is not using only, for example, Debian 5, but also has some packages from, say, Debian testing. This is often seen in mixes of Debian testing and unstable. Putting a package on hold asks dpkg not to touch a package - don't remove or upgrade it automatically, for example.

> > 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,
It certainly does.

Thank you