[packagekit] Feeding messages to user while installing packages

[Anders F Björklund]

Fabio Erculiani wrote:

>>> Let me state clearly, not being able to feed messages to user while
>>> installing a package is a NO-NO for any Gentoo-based distributions.
>>> This is the reason why I haven't been able to push PackageKit much in
>>> both Gentoo and Sabayon lands.
>> 
>> Are these interactive, or something that could just be logged somewhere ?
> 
> No, they are not interactive.
> 
>> 
>>> Is there any possible, reliable solution?
>> 
>> If they are interactive, you could do it the same way as debconf does...
> 
> As written above, they're not interactive but should be displayed to
> user while installing or just right after.
> These messages usually contain useful information that user should
> get, example (ignore the einfo part):
> 
>        einfo "In order to update your hddtemp database, run:"
>        einfo "  update-hddtemp.db"
>        einfo "If your hard drive is not recognized by hddtemp, please consider"
>        einfo "submitting your HDD info for inclusion into the Gentoo hddtemp"
>        einfo "database by filing a bug at https://bugs.gentoo.org/"

What I had planned for the ports backend was to run in "--batch" mode,
which would pick the default options for everything (instead of dialog),
and then log the output of each port/package installation to a file...

Presumably the users of PackageKit (http://packagekit.org/pk-profiles.html)
are not fit to answer any questions or understand any information anyway ?
So "go with the defaults and log the output" seemed like the right choice.


I believe DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive does something similar for debconf ?

And for rpm, no input/output should be the default package manager behaviour.

--anders