[packagekit] zypper patches + packages ...

[Scott Reeves]

>>> On 5/6/2010 at 09:26 AM, Michael Meeks <michael.meeks at novell.com> wrote: 
> Hi guys,
> 
> 	As you perhaps may (or may not) know; currently the 'update' and
> 'get-updates' methods in the PackageKit zypp backend only return
> patches.
> 
> 	What is a patch ? in zypper terms this is a consistent collection of
> packages (to update to).
> 
> 	Of course, unfortunately, not all users of zypper have the great
> process behind the scenes to turn their updates into clean, well
> described patches ;-) consequently they appear to see no updates, even
> though there are many packages available.

Initially we wrote those methods to combine and return both but after discussion
with the libzypp team we decided to only do patches. With the patch architecture
available the updaters have a different goal then the goals of manual interactive package
management. The updaters are designed to maintain the stability of your system - generally
it should be safe to throw on any updates listed. Only approved, integrated and tested
updates show up from the update repo.

Many users have multiple 3'rd party repos added. Manual interactive package management is
completely separate.  If you have a repo foo and a new release of a package is made there you
can if you wish install that new bleeding edge version (or pick an intermediate version, or
uninstall it or ...) with zypper or gpk-application. But you don't want that just automatically
showing up in the updaters

> 
> 	I was hoping to fix this; my initial thought is - to list only packages
> that are not associated with a patch as updates. Hopefully this gives us
> the best of both worlds.
> 

Well this is certainly not a "fix" - this is a reversal of an explicit decision.  Without a patch architecture
available, something like that is needed but I don't think just changing the behavior of the zypp backend
is desired. I think you would need to expose a way to select this new behavior.