2008/9/2 Georg Grabler
Hey guys,
I've some concerns. I also posted quite a similar thing to the dev~ list of PackageKit, and I'll also try to get some information in IRC lateron.
First of all, as you might know, the Shaman devs (drf and boom) would like to switch to packagekit with version 2 of Shaman.
Is it their updated plan? (It is said that there will still be packagekit, alpm, aur and abs backends here: http://shaman.iskrembilen.com/trac/wiki/Todo )
Therefore, I looked at the implementation of the ALPM backend in PackageKit (developed by onestep).
OMG! He's Ukrainian and we even met during our community meeting in 2007. The Internet is so small. :-D
As it seems, all operations which at least require a synchronisation, or download functionality, are missing in the backend implementation.
The reason: PackageKit has no functionality to supply server or configuration parameters to the backend library (interfaces missing).
Now, since ALPM does not read any config files (I basically think it's the right way that the frontends have their own config management), I'd like to know before I talk again with the PK maintainers what ALPM would need for all "standard" operations (see chart at http://www.packagekit.org/pk-matrix.html).
Honestly, I think PackageKit is not very suited for a distro like Arch. IMHO it's not very generic and is oriented for fixed-release-based distros like Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/SUSE/etc., but not for distros like Arch or Gentoo, e.g. what GetDistroUpgrades is supposed to mean in Arch? :-) and for me it looks like PackageKit API is missing some stuff that pacman/alpm provides (e.g. how can a frontend to PackageKit easily display a list of orphans?, and how about conflicts/replaces?) (I didn't go through API details deeply, so correct me if I'm wrong). Are PackageKit devs open to improvements that would allow it to be more suitable for Arch? -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)