[packagekit] Raising the quality of backends

[Fabio Erculiani]

On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 10:08 PM, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm starting to be a lot more strict removing backends that either
> don't compile, or are just unmaintained. Here's a list of what we've
> got, and some of the problems:
>
> alpm: ignored cache-age, missing downloaded filter, missing application filter
> apt: unmaintained since May 2012, ignored cache-age, missing downloaded filter
> aptcc: ignored cache-age, missing application filter
> entropy: unmaintained since December 2013, ignored cache-age, missing
> downloaded filter, missing application filter
> hif: missing groups support
> katja: ignored cache-age, missing downloaded filter, missing application filter
> urpmi: unmaintained since Jan 2014, ignored cache-age, missing
> downloaded filter, missing application filter
> pisi: unmaintained since Sep 2013, ignored cache-age, missing
> downloaded filter, missing application filter
> zypp: ignored cache-age, missing downloaded filter, missing application filter
> poldek: unmaintained since Oct 2013, ignored cache-age, missing
> downloaded filter, missing application filter
> portage: unmaintained since Nov 2013, ignored cache-age, missing
> downloaded filter, missing application filter
> ports: unmaintained since May 2013, ignored cache-age, missing
> downloaded filter, missing application filter
>
> These are pretty easy to fix. The cache age is a job property that
> tells the backed when to get new metadata, so if we send a
> GetUpdates() with a cache_age of 1 week, and the metadata is only 5
> days old, we return the cached results without downloading new
> metadata. This is needed to make the gnome packagekit and gnome
> software UI's to appear without a spinner showing for minutes on end.

If these are easy to fix, please go ahead and fix them. Or perhaps
reference me to some commit I can use to see what needs to be done.
I wished that backend backward compatibility would be kept, at this point.

Or at the very least, if it's easy to fix as you mentioned, just fix
it. Also, if the previous statement holds, the amount of time taken by
doing this should be the same as git rm-ing all the backends that are
there.

>
> The downloaded filter just filters out results that have not already
> been downloaded, and is needed for the offline update mechanism being
> pushed by gnome-software. The application filter is a way of filtering
> the update and installed lists to just packages that contain a
> /usr/share/applications/*.desktop file in the file list and is crucial
> to making GetPackages() to work in anything like an acceptable time
> for a GUI client.
>
> All these "new" features have existed for a very long time. I don't
> see the point in keeping obsolete and unmaintained backends, and so
> any backend that's been two years unmaintained without any of the
> stuff introduced since 0.8.x is going to be removed in the next few
> months. I've already removed the woefully out-of-date ones like yum,
> box, opkg and smart.
>
> Richard
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-- 
Fabio Erculiani