Owen Taylor has been rocking recently. In the 0.3.x releases there’s an optional packagekit-plugin package that is a standard Mozilla plugin. It works in Firefox and Epiphany and looks something like this: Test page shipped with PackageKit It’s actually pretty easy to build a website that wants to install something new or run an application … Continue reading PackageKit Web Plugin
The entire purpose of PackageKit is to abstract out all the uninteresting packaging formats and tools into a coherent API that can be used by cool applications and tools in a cross distribution and architecture way. Of course, this is limited by the distribution guys putting in the effort writing PackageKit backends for their system, … Continue reading PackageKit support status
PackageKit development keeps on trucking. After the ServicePack functionality was added in 0.3.0, we’ve got the GetDistroUpgrades functionality in the soon to be released 0.3.1 The latter allows us ask the backend if there are distro upgrades, for example, when Fedora 10 is released. By default we check for this one a week. I’ve not … Continue reading PackageKit 0.3.x new features
Yesterday I gave my PackageKit talk in Istanbul — I think it went well and the questions were good so overall I’m pleased. If you have any feedback (good or bad) then please email me and tell me what you thought. Slides are here. Thanks
Well, I’ve just released PackageKit 0.2.3 (stable) into the world. I’m going to build this for Fedora 9, as it’s a massive improvement over 0.1.12 and should have no regressions and plenty of nice features compared to that old version. It’ll sit in updates-testing for a few weeks, and if there are no problems I’ll … Continue reading PackageKit UI Improvements (and 0.2.3)
There’s one use case that I’m very interested in, and that is getting new users with the correct environment to build and start hacking on software or using other software tools. For instance, on www.packagekit.org in the FAQ section, we can have a link to install build files to start hacking on PackageKit. Now, this … Continue reading PackageKit bundles?
I asked for translations a few days ago for the dameon, and got a fantastic response. Thanks go out to Vojtěch Smejkal, Piotr Drąg, Daniele Costarella, Marc-André Lureau, Arnout Lok, Alon Zakai, jcome, Lubomir Kundrak, Stephan Sachse and Javier Castro for all the new .po files. I’ve also asked Dimitris Glezos to setup Transifex for … Continue reading Transifex and PackageKit
Due to the way PolicyKit works, not all the translations can be done in the client tools. The authentication dialogs come from the daemon and thus don’t get translated by the GNOME translation team. The GNOME guys are rocking doing the client stuff, but the daemon remains untranslated. If you have a spare few minutes … Continue reading Helping to translate PackageKit
I've finally solved all the issues with PackageKit and Debian – I present the new gnome-packagekit frontend for Debian: Joking aside, Debian and Ubuntu can work just fine with PackageKit, I'm really not sure what all the noise is about.
Do you develop a GNOME program and want to install extra stuff for your application? Want me to write you some code for your application to make it “just work”? Ideas I can think of: • Installing extensions in epiphany • Installing debuginfos in the GNOME crasher thing • Installing language packs in abiword • … Continue reading Using PackageKit in GNOME programs