A PackageKit browser plugin

Owen Taylor otaylor at redhat.com
Thu Jul 24 18:39:34 UTC 2008


We've been working on a website for browsing (rating, commenting,
etc) available applications for Fedora. As part of that we wanted
to be able to install/run software from the website.

I spent the last day hacking up a quick browser plugin:

If the package is not installed but is available in the package
repository, the plugin will show:

 +------------------------------------+
 | _Install GNU Backgammon Now_       |
 | Version: 20061119-14.fc9           |
 +------------------------------------+

Click on the plugin, and it will fire off gpk-install-package to install
the package; the display changes to:

 +------------------------------------+
 | GNU Backgammon                     |
 | Installing...                      |
 +------------------------------------+

once that is done (or if the package was already installed), the plugin
will show:

 +------------------------------------+
 | _Run GNU Backgammon_               |
 | Installed version: 20061119-14.fc9 |
 +------------------------------------+

Given wide usage of PackageKit and availability of the plugin, this
could also be pretty neat to put on third-party project pages. The
information you provide as parameters to the plugin is:

 The name of the application for display
 A list of possible package names
 A list of possible desktop file names for the application

So it should be pretty robust against inter-distro differences in
package names.

README File:
 
 http://git.fishsoup.net/cgit/packagekit-plugin/tree/README

Getting the source:

 git clone git://git.fishsoup.net/packagekit-plugin

What do people think... does this make sense as part of the PackageKit
project?

- Owen





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