[packagekit] Raising the quality of backends

[Anders F Björklund]

Richard Hughes wrote:

>>> 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?

Right, but I don't know if there's anyone from the distribution
doing that. I suppose not, or you would have noticed already...

Could also be because they're using GNOME 2.32, and don't need it.
And PC-BSD have their own spin on how to do apps, with the PBI etc.

http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/AppCafe%C2%AE/10.0

http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Package_Manager/10.0

>> https://github.com/freebsd/portupgrade
> 
> Right, I think compiled backends are much more maintainable (and
> faster) than an spawned backend.

Saw that with yum ;-)

The portupgrade utility is nice because it handles *both* ports
and packages, but using pkgng directly makes more sense for PK.
The support for source packages was always a bit sketchy, as I
don't think the target audience is all that familiar with building ?

* http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/pk-profiles.html

>> 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.

It does, it works on the same layer as apt and yum - just one up.
i.e. one layer above dpkg and rpm, not two levels away (like PK).

>> I think you need the backing of a distro, in order to have a backend ?
> 
> I also think that's true.

Which is somewhat sad, but maybe inevitable if it is "cross-distro".
More of hiding the differences away than fixing them, but whatever.

So I'll just suffer away with yum and wait for the dust to settle.
Or teach hawkey and repodata how to handle debs, or something ;-)

--anders