Author: hughsie

When pk-application gets packages that meet a search criteria it just prints the package name, version, summary and if it's installed or not. This is really bad from a UI point of view.

What I want is:

__________
[        ]  packagename-version
[  ICON  ]  Translated short description
[________]     [more]

Unfortunately, neither the translated short description nor the icon is present in a rpm or deb. This seems odd to me, as in Windows world an installer package gets to choose its own icon, although I appreciate there is usually a loader involved.

gnome-app-install hardcodes everything to ubuntu package naming and iterates on a mirror of the ubuntu servers picking out desktop files. This isn't ideal as it's ubuntu specific and requires quite a bit of manual fixing up and package specific checks. But it looks good.

So we have several solutions to this problem:

1. Modify every packaging system to return a translated package name and icon for each package in the repo.
2. Maintain a separate packagekit-data package which is just full of icon files and translated .desktop files, and a per-distro common_name->package_name database.
3. Don't display an icon for the package and only show the icon of the group type.

Option 1 would require massive code changes in all the packaging formats and isn't really an option.
Option 2 is a never-ending-story and there would be a massive workload to keep the database up to date and the translations fresh. There would need to be some sort of web interface to keep everything updated without a deluge of patches.
Option 3 is what I'm doing now, but looks completely amateur compared to gnome-app-install.

So, ideas?

Progress with PackageKit is amazing. I've had lots and lots of patches from many contributors which is great, thanks to you all. There is still lots of library and API churn but the code and GUIs are being slowly developed into something useful. The yum backend is almost complete.

There's now a mailing list for PackageKit development. Please subscribe if you want notifications of new features, or if you have questions about the GUI or daemon, or if you are a backend writer. It's hopefully going to be a low-traffic list.

Also, the download location of the daemon is now:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/packagekit

Thanks to the fd.o admin for sorting out my project creation request.

edit: use the fd.o mailing list, not the google group. Thanks.

Anyone interested in PackageKit develpment is invited to join the channel #PackageKit on freenode.
We can answer questions on backends, GUI's or anything else PackageKit related.

The PackageKit source tree needed gtk, libnotify and all sorts of weird gnomey libs to compile, which seemed to upset the non-GNOME people a little. The actual daemon just needs glib, libnm, dbus-glib and policykit so it did seem somewhat non-optimal to me as well. I've split the daemon and GUI parts into two projects:

 git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/PackageKit git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/gnome-packagekit 

Just install gnome-packagekit when you have PackageKit installed – gnome-packagekit uses libpackagekit to do all the heavy lifting, so the GUI bits are actually very simple:

 [hughsie@hughsie-laptop src]$ wc -l *.c *.h    56 pk-application.h   725 pk-application.c   104 pk-application-main.c    60 pk-notify.h   958 pk-notify.c   76 pk-update-icon.c   1979 total 

In the gnome-packagekit project I'll start marking strings translatable, and there's also a yelp file for someone to fill out for me in the future. I might move gnome-packagekit to GNOME svn when things are a bit more stable, so stuff like translations and HIG changes are easy to commit. This means it's really trivial to port an existing applications to use libpackagekit, or to create, for example, kpackagekit.

Okay, quite a major omission on my part, but the PackageKit 'Package' signal previously didn't send the version or architecture of the queried package. It does now.

I've also merged in the start of a conary backend (thanks Ken!) and made the spawn code an order of magnitude faster. There's also quite a bit of interest in making a pacman and emerge backend for PackageKit too.

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.

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.

PackageKit has an application called pk-update-icon that is run once per session automatically. It is a lightweight binary that just calls into PackageKit and watches for status changes. It initiates the Refresh (non-forced) and GetUpdates after login and periodically checks for updates every couple of hours. This isn't configurable, but it would be trivial to hook up to gconf.

It has two status area icons, one for PackageKit current status and one for updates. Hold the pitchforks.

The PackageKit status icon only appears when a job is in progress, for instance a cog icon appears when doing an rpm install. It disappears when PackageKit is shutdown, which is currently after 60 seconds idle. It's basically a way of seeing what PackageKit is currently doing.

The update icon only appears when there are updates available, and additionally a libnotify window appears if there are critical updates available. Below is the dummy backend displaying the data, as yum doesn't seem to know if an update is security sensitive or normal. Ideas welcome on how to fix this.

Code is in git. My English spelling and grammar are crap (as usual), and nothing is localized, but that can be fixed later. Or alternatively, I accept patches.

Two new features coded today:

This isn't the final GUI…

PolicyKit rocks…

So, good things.

For PackageKit we don't want to be refreshing caches or checking for updates when there is no network connection. Does anyone have a short guide on how to monitor and query the connected state of nm (session or system), just like evolution does? Any nm guys want to write me a quick patch or jot down some quick code? Cheers.

EDIT: Done, thanks guys.

git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/PackageKit

Patches accepted. Thanks.

edit: Now git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/packagekit