KPackageKit interview

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi,

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20081020

"As we have seen from our current series on package management tools, 
the wide variety of options for managing software in distributions can 
be confusing at times. Isn't there a way of unifying the various 
utilities under one one set of commands that would work on all the 
different Linux systems? PackageKit, developed by Fedora, is trying to 
do just that. Here is a nice interview with the developers of 
KPackageKit, a graphical front-end to PackageKit. So what exactly is it 
and how does it work? "PackageKit is an abstraction layer above several 
package managers (YUM, APT, Conary...). It hence defines a standard 
interface to interact with the package manager on any system, and allows 
deeper integration with the desktop. PackageKit is a daemon started on 
demand via dbus, all the commands to the daemon are also passed via 
dbus, which makes it platform independent. The actions are controlled by 
PolicyKit, which allows to define precisely the rights of each user. 
Historically, PackageKit was shipped with a glib-based abstraction 
library, and a GTK+ front-end."


Rahul