Putting PackageKit metadata on the Fedora LiveCD

While working on the preview of GNOME Software for Fedora 20, one problem became very apparent: When you launched the “Software” application for the first time, it went and downloaded metadata and then built the libsolv cache. This could take a few minutes of looking at a spinner, and was a really bad first experience. We tried really hard to mitagate this, in that when we ask PackageKit for data we say we don’t mind the cache being old, but on a LiveCD or on first install there wasn’t any metadata at all.

So, what are we doing for F21? We can’t run packagekitd when constructing the live image as it’s a D-Bus daemon and will be looking at the system root, not the live-cd root. Enter packagekit-direct. This is an admin-only tool (no man page) installed in /usr/libexec that designed to be run when you want to run the PackageKit backend without getting D-Bus involved.

For Fedora 21 we’ll be running something like DESTDIR=$INSTALL_ROOT /usr/libexec/packagekit-direct refresh in fedora-live-workstation.ks. This means that when the Live image is booted we’ve got both the distro metadata to use, and the libsolv files already built. Launching gnome-software then takes 440ms until it’s usable.