Add/Remove Software

[Will Woods]

On Apr 27, 2008, at 5:12 PM, Andrew Farris wrote:

> G.Wolfe Woodbury wrote:
>> Pirut was supposed to remain in the repository for F9 as an  
>> alternative
>> for this new POS interface, but "they" went ahead and obsoleted pirut
>> and have now removed it from F9 completely.
>> I don't know quite who "they" are, but I am quite angry about it.   
>> Not
>> to the extent of leaving (like ESR did) but still quite angry.
>> Someone should explain why pirut is gone so completely.
>
> Thats pretty easy if you've followed list discussions on it.. Pirut  
> was unmaintained and incapable of adapting to PolicyKit  
> authorizations which is an amazing feature of F9.  Why its gone is  
> because PackageKit needed to provide the interface for package  
> install behavior from file managers and it was best served by taking  
> over that interface from pirut.

Another thing from following the pirut/PackageKit discussions: for  
every person unhappy about PackageKit, there were three other people  
gushing about how awesome PackageKit is, denouncing pirut as the  
ugliest, slowest, most broken package manager on the face of the  
earth, and all but *demanding* that we immediately drop pirut.

People were lining up to help develop/test/improve PackageKit. Nobody  
was willing to step forward to improve or help maintain pirut.

Jeremy Katz - pup/pirut maintainer and Anaconda lead - already has  
more than enough stuff to work on (have you SEEN the new features in  
anaconda in F9?), and nobody wanted to help with pirut. Everyone told  
him it was ugly and slow and horrible and not worth the effort to  
maintain for a moment longer.

Eventually, I think he found himself agreeing with that last point.

Welcome to one downside of Open Source - the CADT development model[1]  
means that stable, reliable, mature codebases regularly get thrown  
away in favor of gratuitious rewrites.

Makes QA a lot of fun, let me tell you.

> And yes, you can still use yumex, or just use yum for getting many  
> packages installed at once.  There is upstream work being done on  
> making the 'one install at a time' thing much more pleasant, and  
> instead of complaining about it this discussion could be taken to  
> the upstream list where it would be useful in talking about the  
> options for making that UI change happen...

As I loudly and repeatedly requested a month ago[2] - file bugs about  
any and all problems with PackageKit. That's the only way it's going  
to improve.

-w

[1] http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
[2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2008-March/msg00939.html