PackageKit : Requiring a restart… – Technical Blog of Richard Hughes

This morning I've added the RequireRestart signal into PackageKit, and connected it up with the server and client. All code is in git master.

usual warnings about my spelling and grammar, yadda yadda…

The restart types are system (reboot), session (logout and back in) and application (restart program).
Only the dummy backend supports this for now, although it's trivial to add to the others.

Request for yum help:

Do you know python? Are you familiar with rpm and yum internals? if so please email me – the yum backend needs some serious love. I've got a few people helping with PackageKit the moment; Tom Parker is rocking with the libapt-pkg backend and skvidal and Luke Macken are helping with the yum backend but I need more people to write new backend code.

Request for backend writers:

Want to join the fun? The core code and API are ready, any there is even a README for you to follow. I would like to see urpmi and conary backends added next week if possible. All it takes is someone very familiar with the packaging system and a few hours of time. If you supply me with scripts that adhere to the common helper standard then I'll even wire up PackageKit for you.

Thanks.

Published by

hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food. View all posts by hughsie

One thought on “PackageKit : Requiring a restart…”

Hi hughsient, first I'd like to thank you for the efforts you put into PackageKit. I think that this is a great project, and that it has great potential. I'd suggest to change “A system reboot is required” to something like “In order to apply the changes, a system reboot is required.” or something like that. Sorry, I am no native speaker, but that sounds better to me :) Also, an interface to browse desktop applications would be nice so that the full names of applications appear instead of names like “totem-mozilla, epiphany-browser” and so on. Ubuntu has a nice tool, screenshot is located here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/attachment.cgi?id=160692 maybe some code could be taken from it. As far as I know, they look which desktop files packages install and generate a package containing them (maybe modified?). Those .desktops are displayed in the application. This is – of course – not optimal for a tool which aims to work on multiple distributions.

Comments are closed.