RFC: On-demand package installation API in kdelibs

[Kevin Krammer]

On Wednesday, 2010-07-28, Lubos Lunak wrote:

>  So the idea is to provide simple API in the form of 'bool
> tryToEnsureInstalled{MimeType|Binary|Whatever}( QString name )'. Various
> KDE code will call it when it finds out something is missing and maybe the
> call solves the problem.

While I like the idea of making it easy for developers to incorporate such a 
feature, I am afraid that this stile of API is simplified to much.

Installing things, especially when potentially involving  downloading, is 
inherently asynchronous.
So such an easy method either returns immediately and provides some kind of 
status signalling or it uses nested event loops.

At KDEPIM we've run into numerous nasty side effects when trying to shoehorn 
asynchronous behavior into synchronous APIs.
Our lesson learned was to never to that again even if making a job based API 
(or something like QTcpSocket's start-and-signal-finish) is more work and not 
as trivial to use until you get used to it.

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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