It’s probably no surprise to many of you that PackageKit has been in maintenance mode for quite some time. Although started over ten years ago (!) it’s not really had active maintenance since about 2014. Of course, I’ve still been merging PRs and have been slinging tarballs over the wall every few months, but nothing … Continue reading PackageKit is dead, long live, well, something else
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 … Continue reading Putting PackageKit metadata on the Fedora LiveCD
I’ve been using the hawkey backend on my Fedora 20 system for about 6 weeks now. In that time, I’ve found bugs in hawkey, librepo and even libsolv and I’d like to thank Michael, Tomas and Ales for all the help debugging and reviewing all the fixes. Of course, there were quite a few PackageKit … Continue reading Is PackageKit-hawkey now ready for primetime?
I spent a few days last week optimising PackageKit. I first added a couple of huge 350ms+ optimisations when using Hawkey. Then I turned my attention to the daemon itself and after adding a lot of profiling hooks to packagekitd, I recoiled in horror the amount of time it took to do simple things that everyone … Continue reading PackageKit on speed
Does anyone actually use the PackageKit service pack or catalog functionality? If there are no users I’m intending to rip out the unused and unloved features from GNOME 3.12. Please say now, or forever hold your peace. Thanks.
Yesterday I merged a patch to PackageKit which added the UpgradeSystem() method to the transaction interface. This is the natural compliment of the GetDistropUgrades() method which was added last year. This allows a session user to upgrade the OS using the same familiar PackageKit tools, and without doing dumb things like asking for the admin … Continue reading Preupgrade, meet PackageKit
PackageKit tries really hard to work for these people. PackageKit is designed for these people. Debconf is a simple protocol that dpkg uses to ask the user configuration data at install time. I think it’s generally a bad idea, as installing should generally be silent and automatic and configuration should be a separate step. That … Continue reading PackageKit and Debian
There’s been a lot of noise about PackageKit and debconf in the past, but not an awful lot of coding… Until now. Daniel Nicoletti is the maintainer of KPackageKit, and a log time contributor to PackageKit. He’s also the guy behind all the recent SimulateX() methods that required quite a bit of clever coding to … Continue reading PackageKit and debconf (progress)
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been re-writing the existing PackageKit-glib bindings. The old library was beginning to limit what we could do with client applications. The biggest problems were: A lot of the dbus calls are sync, which slowed down application startup and user input “snappyness” A lot of the methods were not … Continue reading A new glib library for PackageKit
A few people mentioned on my last blog post that instead of nagging the user to unplug or restart, we should just rebind the device. I didn’t do this yesterday as it was quite hard to do the layering correctly as the session is running as a normal user. But of course, doing things correctly … Continue reading PackageKit and device rebinding