[packagekit] Raising the quality of backends

[Richard Hughes]

On 10 September 2014 22:36, Anders F Björklund
<afb at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> Seems you missed out the "slapt", but it was also unmaintained (2011).

slapt got the chop last year I think.

>> ports: unmaintained since May 2013, ignored cache-age, missing
>> downloaded filter, missing application filter
>
> The ports backend was replaced with one for pkgng, which probably
> suited better for PackageKit (i.e. it's not called PortsKit is it,
> and it doesn't really support running with "mock" for yum distros
> if something happens to not be available as binary rpm packages)

So remove "ports" and hope that they push pkgng it upstream?

> https://github.com/freebsd/portupgrade

Right, I think compiled backends are much more maintainable (and
faster) than an spawned backend.

> But the problem for Smart was that the backend just didn't start
> quick enough for PackageKit, being written in Python and loading
> the entire package database into memory at start up. And since it
> was cross-distribution, it never had any of the distro files etc.

smart was pretty awesome in the day; other package managers just
caught up, and got more traction. I always felt that smart tried to
abstract things a step lower from PackageKit.

> I think you need the backing of a distro, in order to have a backend ?

I also think that's true.

Richard.