Is PackageKit-hawkey now ready for primetime?

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 bugs fixed too. So if you’re testing PackageKit-hawkey you really want to update to these packages:

Those updates are currently on their way to updates-testing, but will be in Fedora 20 in a few short days barring any last minute problems. I am now happy we can switch Fedora 21 to using hawkey by default, and reap the rewards of all the hard work put in by so many people over the last few months. I for one am really happy about the speed boost brought to all the applications using PackageKit.

On that note, happy Christmas everyone.

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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.

5 thoughts on “Is PackageKit-hawkey now ready for primetime?”

  1. Just tried installing these, and then playing a bit with GNOME Software.

    It is now blazingly fast!

    And no crashes. :)

    Gave it some karma, so that the updates can get to stable quickly.

    Thanks a lot for your work on this part of our OS.

  2. Hi,

    I’ve installed the Hawkey backend for packagekit, but now Packagekit (and as a result the Software program) doesn’t receive any updates anymore.

    I am not sure where I should place the actual bug report but I’ll post a snippet of some ptrogram output here..

    1. The hawkey backend doesn’t use the dnf cache, and only updates the metadata when idle after a few days. It’s quite normal to see the number of updates reported to be out of sync. To force PK to get new metadata just do “pkcon refresh force” and then “pkcon get-updates”

  3. Thanks for the explanation.

    It still seems kind of “broken”. I am pretty sure the updates (at least some of them) were already there for quite some days (probably a week). I am not sure what the refresh-rate for PackageKit is, but at least every 2 days seems not an unacceptable refresh time (considering the rate Fedora is coming with updates).

    I also seem to be missing the point of a refresh operation if it actually does not refresh? (at least it should tell me why it didn’t refresh…)

    Also the possibility in the Software program (or PackageKit) to
    A) see the last time updates were checked
    B) manually refresh if desired
    would be a nice addition

  4. PS: I am aware that this blog might not be the best place to discuss this, but with so many projects involved (the Software UI Program, PackageKit, PackageKit-Hawkey, Hawkey/dnf/yum/fedora) I am quite at loss to start searching for the correct mailing list / bugtracker.

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