RFC: On-demand package installation API in kdelibs

[Lubos Lunak]

On Wednesday 28 of July 2010, John Layt wrote:
> There's a long-standing wish in bko to allow users to install
> KDE translations from the locale kcm, i.e. a big button in the Languages
> tab saying "Install More Translations".  I'm currently re-writing the kcm
> and was just about to ask around on opinions about it.
>
> The Spell Checker kcm
> could also do with an "Install More Dictionaries" button.
>
> For this purpose
> any such api would need to be able to queried for a list of language codes
> for available translations or dictionaries to show the user, and then take
> a given language code and try to install the translation or
> dictionary.

 I haven't thought of adding calls for querying what capabilities are 
available, my first idea here would be to simply try to do 
e.g. 'installCapability( "kde-translations-cz" )'. That should take care 
of "Install More Translations" (if that means "more for this language").

 What would you need the querying for? Would it be for "more translations" 
== "more languages"? Querying could be added, so that you could 
do 'queryCapability( "kde-translation" )' and it'd 
give "kde-translation-cz", "kde-translation-de" etc., but I expect you might 
have a small problem with getting "Czech", "German" out of that. You 
generally cannot get all info about a package without installing it first, so 
all this would need to be stuffed into packages' capabilities (e.g. 
rpm's 'provides'). What would be your requirements here exactly?

> Doesn't DrKonqi already do something like this for debug
> packages?

 It calls a given executable with a list of binaries for which debuginfo is 
needed and lets the executable deal with it.

> You'd also need to talk to the Windows and Mac guys about
> it.

 Well I suppose I'm talking to them now too, am I not?

-- 
 Lubos Lunak
 openSUSE Boosters team, KDE developer
 l.lunak at suse.cz , l.lunak at kde.org