GNOME PackageKit updates

A few nice things have been happening lately. The first is the re-versioning of 0.4.4 to 2.27.1, so that we can stick to GNOME release versions and the promise of release freezes. This should make it a bit easier for distributors, and will make the transition to gnome.org a little bit easier.

We’ve also been doing some tinkering around the edges to make things work better, hopefully without getting in the way. This is shown quite nicely from the following UI from the new update viewer.

Saving you money every day of the week...
Saving you money every day of the week...

And, thanks to Daniel Nicoletti, PackageKit now understands media requests, so the backends can request the user do something with physical media. This is still using the non-blocking logic we’ve always been using, so if we’re using multiple disks then the content has to be copied off each one in turn before the transaction, rather then installing direct from the media. Trust me, it’s better this way.

New media change dialog
New media change dialog

We’ve also been removing some dead code (libsexy, libglade, etc), and tidying up the existing objects, so hopefully 2.27.2 can be released in a few weeks. Comments, as always, welcomed.

Converting to GtkBuilder

This evening I’ve been trying to convert my projects (gnome-packagekit and gnome-power-manager) away from libgade to the shinier GtkBuilder. One less library, right? So far so good, except for the fancy super sexy custom widgets.

Stuff like the graph widget in gnome-power-statistics was created using the glade_set_custom_handler function, which was then creating the widget using gpm_graph_widget_new() in that callback. I’m not sure how to do this with GtkBuilder and the new markup format. Google isn’t being very helpful. Help appreciated. Thanks!