Attended a presentation on PackageKit today...

BigglesPiP

BigglesPiP

BigglesPiP

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I'm actually quite impressed.

Some of you may know it better as "the add/remove thing in ubuntu".

Presentation was by Richard Hughes, the project's creator. It's basically a repo. handler/depsolver which can sit atop deb or rpm.

It has a core component which runs as a demon, accepting requests from multiple users, and applications, and queueing them cleverly. Advantage is it's multi user (better for fast user switching), and the GUI & CLI don't need to be root, there's still security via PolicyKit. It can also handle updates.

If you adopt it totally you never need to see a locked package manager message again. And while you can still use apt-get/yum, you can only do so when the packagekitd isn't working on something.

I like the direction they're steering in, in that they want the GUI to show programs, not packages.

He showed the current update-manager, listing a bunch of undecipherable packages to update. Then the mac update-manager, showing a list of actual programs it wants to update, but it wanted to download the whole program again. They want to do a bit of both, sort of "3KiB of Pidgin will be updated".

I could see myself completely switching to it and forgetting apt-get once they reach v1.0.?.

Hope I got that mostly right.

pkcon FTW?
 
I like the direction they're steering in, in that they want the GUI to show programs, not packages.
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Should be an option. Nothing wrong with having an advanced mode to placate the geeks.

I tried it out on a development Fedora build and it was pretty poop.
While I've not been impressed by it, I think the move to unify packages across distributions is something that needs doing.
And this is a good bridging step.
 
yashiro said:
I think the move to unify packages across distributions is something that needs doing.
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GOD NO! Just won't work, Debian needs to have old, well tested, stable packages build specifically for Debian.

Arch needs the latest and greatest, built for Arch.

I'm sure you will still be able to search packages, maybe just use the CLI like I do with apt-get and apt-cache. In fact I don't think I have synaptic installed.
 
Unify the package format, not the data within it. Although that would bring it's own problems.
I dunno, I doubt Linux will ever really be competitive in any market but the 'cheap server'.
So I doubt the packaging issues ever matter in the end.
 
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Indeed, but then why do we have package managers in that case? Circular argument.

End result though is that things need to be made simpler and more efficient for everyone, including yourself. Will PackageKit help or will it be just another layer atop an old system?
 
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