Project: libmuon package install for 3rd party applications

[Jonathan Riddell]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 09:14:45PM +0100, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> > 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)

Maybe it's just for full package managers that it's an issue and it
would work fine for this use case.  The packagekit in Ubuntu is being
held back but chatting today with ubuntu people it could be updated to
packagekit 0.9 which is what kicker needs and I guess other places
where this would be useful.

> > 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()

Ubuntu and Debian have pretty limited support for this which is a
shame but for limited use cases it's not too bad to have a cmake
option to set the package name.

> > 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).

The ones I know are in the proposal I wrote
 https://community.kde.org/GSoC/2015/Ideas#Various_Places

Jonathan