[packagekit] PackageKit support for Fedora modularity?

[Martin Pitt]

Hello all,

for context, I recently added the PackageKit based "Software Updates" page to
Cockpit [1]. (This might be something to add to [2]?)

In Fedora there is currently some effort to aggregate or group (not entirely
sure which yet) related packages into "modules" [3], to decouple their life
cycles and maintenance from the base distro, and also to install a group of
related packages in one go [4]: For example, there might be something like
`dnf install lamp-stack-1.2.3`. Likewise, it seems that the entire basic OS
will only logically consist of very few modules (HW enablement, system runtime,
app runtime) instead of dozens or hundreds of packages which could be
(un)installed and upgraded individually.

From the docs it appears that such a module should be treated more like a
package and less like a repository; at least dnf is being modified heavily to
support this.

It seems to me that we'lll need to teach PackageKit about modules: In the
simple case they get treated like repositories, and their name just needs to
get exposed to the API (perhaps just like we expose the repository name
already). In the more involved case of treating a module like a package, and
hiding the individual rpms contained in them, PK would most likely need to grow
a more thorough understanding of what a module is.

As I'm new to the PK community: Is there anyone who has already thought or even
worked on this, who would want to connect? I'm happy to put some work into
this, but this first requires some shared understanding of how modules fit into
PK.

Thanks,

Pitti

[1] http://cockpit-project.org/blog/cockpit-143.html
[2] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/pk-users.html
[3] https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/
[4] https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/prototype/boltron/instructions.html
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