[packagekit] zypper patches + packages ...

[Klaus Kaempf]

* Scott Reeves <sreeves at novell.com> [May 06. 2010 19:35]:
> > 
> > 	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.

I fully agree.

> > 
> 
> 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.

If I remember correctly, this 'explicit decision' was based on
limitations in the libzypp architecture.

With Code11 (openSUSE 11.x, SLES 11) we switched from our own patch
format to rpm-md 'updateinfo.xml'.

This provides additional data for (package) updates like
- information why an update is needed
- reference(s) to the fixed bugs, cve numbers, etc
- group multiple package updates into a single 'patch' for the UI
  (ever done a glibc update on a 64 bit system ? You'll get about a
   dozen package updates for a single fix in glibc)

The original proposal was to compute available package updates first
and then use updateinfo for grouping and additional information.

Those packages not covered by an entry in updateinfo would just appear
as 'package update' without additional information in the UI.

However, this required to create libzypp patch objects on the fly,
after computing available updates. Something libzypp is (was?) not
capable of.

Klaus
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