Fedora 9 Beta, PackageKit and system-config-printer

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 12:11 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> 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.

The fact that the backends may have different capabilities doesn't mean
you need to expose those details to the world with the frontends.  There
should be _one_ "install a new package by name" which can take files,
package names, provides names,
$whatever_other_crack_some_other_backend_supports.  And then the
frontend code just says "does this backend support this method?  no,
okay, keep going".

> > 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.

Ermm, I don't think you got my point.  Or I didn't get yours.
Alternatives for /usr/bin/system-install-packages just between
pk-install-file and pk-install-application can't work because there's no
way to choose between the two at a system level.  And we're not going to
play that game between PackageKit and pirut because see above about
resources.

Jeremy