Fedora 9 Beta, PackageKit and system-config-printer

[Richard Hughes]

On Sun, 2008-03-16 at 21:34 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> The difference between pk-install-file and pk-install-package (or the
> non-existent pk-install-by-provides-name) is pretty arbitrary and not
> necessarily something that a user is going to know.

Sure, I'm guessing users won't be using these directly, applications or
desktop launchers will. And we do need to split these as some packagekit
backends won't support resolving or installing a filename and some will.
We just can't accept free text input into the backends else there's no
abstraction whatsoever.

> And there's no need for alternatives, because supporting two packaging
> UIs is insane.
> We really don't have that kind of resources.  Instead,
> we're going to actually *make* decisions and choose.

There's about 20 lines of C to do this, most of the stuff is abstract.
See
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=users/hughsient/gnome-packagekit.git;a=blob;hb=HEAD;f=src/pk-install-file.c for how easy it is to do this with libpackagekit.

Richard.