Listaller integration in PackageKit

[Matthias Klumpp]

Hi there again!
Some of you already knew that I was speaking with Richard Jughes, the
maintainer of PackageKit, and others about an inclusion of Listaller
functions to PackageKit.
The background for this decision is that we already did a lot of duplicate
work with PK. Now PackageKit got AppInstall support, which also provides
some of the features Listaller already has.
Another reason are the frontends: Currently we have Listaller frontends
and PackageKit frontends. If we continued developing Listaller without
speaking with the PK team, we would have had two frontends (e.g. two KDE
Control Modules) which provide similar functionality: One has functions the
other frontend has not and vice versa. This is really stupid and confusing
for users.
Now the solution I came up with the PK team is to add apps which are found
by Listaller to the AppInstall data with a special repo-version. So the
PackageKit daemon knows if an application belongs to the native package
management (and has to be forwarded to a PK backend) or if it can be
handled by Listaller.
In the end we will have GNOME-PackageKit and KPackageKit (AppGet) handling
Listaller-Apps! You might ask why I haven't spoken about including support
for Listaller IPKs... The reason is simple: IPK is not ready yet. And it
would not be nice to establish a common Linux setup-standard by going this
way round. I'd like to have a discussion about the IPK format by the
communities of some major distributions first before I push anything to PK.
Now, since we add parts of Listaller's functionality to PackageKit, I also
want to rethink some implementations of Listaller. The following stuff will
be done bring Listaller & PK a bit more close together:
1) Make Listaller use PackageKit's PolKit policy
2) Update the search logic (LiAppLook) for new apps and make all stuff
use the AppInstall SQLite database
3) Drop Listaller's own DB completely
4) Extend the API and provide access to more methods of the LiAppManager
class
5) Re-implement LOKI setup removal stuff to be able to run it without X
6) Add a new global config system for Listaller
7) Update the API again to make it a little more PK-like (focus on
callback functions!)
This will be what I need to do the next weeks. Then I will try to produce
a patch to make PK use Listaller. (If someone wants to help with any of
these points, please speak up!)
After this is done, we have to think again about the IPK1.1 specs. Also I
need someone to update & modify the parts inherited from Autopackage (Jan,
where are you!? :-P) Especially we need to update the documentation (we can
copy the Autopackage docs) and edit some of the files like "binreloc" to
integrate seamless with Listaller.
This is a bunch of work to do, but it's nice to see how fast this project
is moving again!
I hope someone wants to help with this stuff :D
Kind regards
Matthias Klumpp

[Jan Niklas Hasse]

Hi Matthias,

sounds good, but also a lot of work :D

I will create a new thread concerning the spec.

-
Jan