RFC: On-demand package installation API in kdelibs

[Lubos Lunak]

On Thursday 29 of July 2010, dantti85-dev at yahoo.com.br wrote:
> Weird nobody said a word about what I posted...
> so what about just using PackageKit interface?

 Because maybe it should be you saying something about it :) ?

> If your app is in gnome it will use the gnome packagekit
> http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/sysadmin/kpackagekit/SmartIcon/org.f
>reedesktop.PackageKit.xml?revision=1055286&view=markup

 Could you elaborate a bit more on suitability for the task? The only real 
experience with PackageKit I have is by using KUpdateApplet, the openSUSE 
tool for checking and installing updates, and it can be summed up as, to put 
it bluntly, 'PackageKit sucks'. KUpdateApplet hasn't seen any development 
besides maintenance for several last openSUSE releases, yet there are 
regressions every single release (otherwise KUpdateApplet probably wouldn't 
even need the maintenance). IIRC the KUpdateApplet maintainer mentioned that 
PackageKit changes more often than the things it abstracts, which is pathetic 
for an abstraction layer and IMO a showstopper for KDE usage. It also seemed 
pretty over-engineered when I had to help with an urgent KUpdateApplet bugfix 
once. Finally, how widely available is it actually?

> Additionally to this interface you can create catalog
> files which when you issue KPackageKit it
> parses it and reads the packages that are suited to
> your distro.
>
> I think instead of creating new API I could write
> some kde developer pages explaining how to use it.

 The point of this API is to provide simple means for checking and installing 
components if necessary, and D-Bus interface is not that. One of the 
implementations of the API could use it though.

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