[pacman-dev] ALPM & PackageKit

[Roman Kyrylych]

2008/9/2 Georg Grabler <ggrabler at gmail.com>:
> 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)