[packagekit] Potential unmaintained backend removals

[Anders F Björklund]

Richard Hughes wrote:

> I'm going to be clearing out any unmaintained backends that have not
> had at least one commit from an author other than me in the last 18
> months.

I don't know of anyone using the Slapt backend (or slapt-get[*] either,
for that matter - all form of dependency management is blocked upstream)
It was written as an experiment to see how hard it was to do a compiled
backend, you can remove it any time. Unless an actual slacker speaks up ?

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slapt-get

The Smart backend is different, the execution model (loading the package
cache at application startup) makes it too slow to use with PackageKit.
By the time another call is made, the backend will have shut down and it
needs to load the cache into memory again. So it doesn't really "work".

The whole model of smart was to allow interoperatibility at the package
and package manager level, whereas PackageKit does it on the distribution
and meta-package manager level. So it doesn't really have (one) distro.
i.e. Smart talks with rpm and dpkg, PackageKit talks with yum and apt

It's probably not a big deal to keep it limping along, but there's some
information missing from the actual package metadata that is currently only
provided from the "outside" - so it cannot deliver the needed information.
i.e. things like GetDistroUpgrades, WhatProvides, Supported, AppData, etc

So might as well remove it. How did it go with the BSD ports/pkg backends ?

--anders