Technical Blog of Richard Hughes

I've finally solved all the issues with PackageKit and Debian - I present the new gnome-packagekit frontend for Debian: Joking aside, Debian and Ubuntu can work just fine with PackageKit, I'm really not sure what all the noise is about.

Do you develop a GNOME program and want to install extra stuff for your application? Want me to write you some code for your application to make it “just work”? Ideas I can think of: • Installing extensions in epiphany • Installing debuginfos in the GNOME crasher thing • Installing language packs in abiword • Installing clipart for scribus • Installing -devel packages in anjuta for the autocompletion • Making GIMP install it's own plugins when an obscure file format is opened Any other suggestions welcome. Please email me if you want some help. You can install a package based on the package name, or just by specifying a file that the package provides. All the yucky stuff like licence agreements and GPG auth is handled in libpackagekit-gnome. You'll need to be running Fedora 9 prerelease if you want precompiled rpm's that work. I'll make the code a configure option (–enable-packagekit) so it won't be a hard dep. Any takers?

Here's some stuff that now works properly: Notice the new checkbox to cut the repo list down to a sane size? Notice the new 'All packages' group? Now we tell you if we add deps! In other, more interesting news, there's now a new library on the street, libpackagekit-gnome. This shared library will allow integration with GTK dialogs for the common prompts, gconf for licence preferences and hopefully gnome-keyring for the gpg auth stuff. It basically makes adding software in your GNOME application super trivial. More information and samples to come when I've got some gtk-doc documentation. Richard.

In gpk-update-viewer, the user can select with checkboxes which updates should be applied. This is fine, until you want to uncheck or check them all at once, where for 300 updates, unclicking each box seems tiresome. Matthias suggested a checkbox in the treeview header (but can't remember where he had seen that) and I quite like a right-click context menu. The open bug is here. Ideas welcome. Thanks!

Dear Lazyweb, Is there a more modern, GLib'ish version of gperf? I want to go from string->enum and emun->string faster than just using strcmp in a loop. I don't think I want to use GHashTable as it needs to be bi-directional. I like nice compact simple C code, and don't like awk in makefiles. Ideas? Richard.