Project: libmuon package install for 3rd party applications

[Matthias Klumpp]

2015-03-12 21:00 GMT+01:00 Jonathan Riddell <jr at jriddell.org>:
> On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 08:40:46PM +0100, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
>> 2015-03-12 20:34 GMT+01:00 Jonathan Riddell <jr at jriddell.org>:
>> [...]
>> What's the difference between this and the already existing
>> PackageKit(-Qt) and PackageKit session interface? (and the combination
>> of it with AppStream to avoid hardcoding a list of packages, as it
>> seems to be the plan here (?))
>
> Mostly it would keep Debian and Kubuntu happier who aren't great fans
> of PackageKit.

Yeah, I am still waiting for bug reports and feature requests for that ;-)
The only thing where PK falls short is for advanced package managers
like Synaptic on Debian, because it doesn't support features like
holding packages etc. But it was never designed for that. (although to
my suprise someone recently submitted a patch to PK to allow
downgrading of packages)

> Using appstream seems sensible, how do I use it to
> find the name of e.g. the samba package?

It would require the distributor or upstream vendor to ship the
metadata[1]. If upstream projects do that, everyone has the required
information, and getting the packages
(e.g. via libappstream-qt) is as simple as
 Database::componentById("samba")->packageNames()

AppStream was not only designed for applications, but also to fetch
metadata about any software component. E.g. it is already used for
input-methods, fonts and firmware.

> The other half of the
> project would be to implement this in the various places that KDE
> software needs it which nobody seems to have done yet.

Finding places where KDE software could benefit from it would also be
quite a challenge (it's not documented, and lots of software silently
works around missing components).

Cheers,
    Matthias

[1]: http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-Metadata.html#sect-Metadata-GenericComponent

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