[packagekit] AppInstall: Suggestion for application management with Listaller

[Matthias Klumpp]

On Sat, 4 Sep 2010 23:10:44 +0200, Anders F Björklund <afb at algonet.se>
wrote:
> Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> 
>>> Or you could just "wrap" the applications into backend-specific
>>> packages,
>>> and use the regular install/uninstall procedure to avoid having two
>>> sets.
>> This was a suggestion from dantti, but Richard didn't like it, cause
>> everything has to identify with a packageID.
>> So AppInstall would need Listaller-specific PackageIDs.
>> We can discuss this, but this is Richard's dicision.
> 
> If you convert the exe to rpm/deb, I don't think there's a problem.
> i.e. then it would get a normal package-id for the normal backend ?
Hmm? Convert? Listaller is about removing already installed software,
there is no package I can convert. And converting binary setups into
seomething is also not possible cuz they're in a binary format.

> I suppose you could share the same app-install data, even if not using
> packages. Where PackageKit would just skip any entries without a proper
> package-id, since those would be for listaller only. Not sure if that
> is "including", but the desktop files and icons sure are the same...
I plan this already. (Why should we have two DBs which contain
similar/same information?)

> But to me that is different from including Listaller support in PK,
> like making it support both "packages" and "applications" or making
> it possible to have more than one backend active at the same time ?
> (to allow for installing both native packages, and IPK/etc packages)
I first only want to talk about removing applications. But of course PK
could treat IPK packages as normal packages. They follow the PK guidelines
and do nothing unusual.

> Then again, applications without packages aren't *that* much more
> strange than groups without packages... (i.e. the "collections")
> 
> http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2008/09/19/packagekit-collections/
> 
> So it's not *impossible* that PackageKit can handle non-package
> applications with some special flag or id. But it feels hacky...
> 
> http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2009/03/05/application-installing/
Maybe we can store packageIDs in the database and extend the packageID to
contain an "local" origin or something, so PK knows those entries belong to
Listaller. Listaller can then fetch the required .desktop file from the DB
by itself.

> Basically I think there are room for both applications and packages.
> And that AppDirs are the better solution, where packages don't fit ?
> 
> Where packages (and PackageKit) are nice for (system) dependencies,
> but not really needed to download and run an application as a user.
That's all one big issue, we'll see if there is a nice solution for all
that.

Cheers
   Matthias