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The purpose of this side is to coordinate the work on the apt backend for [http://www.packagekit.org PackageKit] and on porting the exisiting applications to PackageKit, mainly update-manager and gnome-app-install. PackageKit tries to make simple and common software management tasks easier and smoother among all/most distributions.

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Current State

We have got a very basic apt backend that currently allows to search (quite slow) and refresh/update the cache.

Code

Some packaging was already done:

https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~packagekit/

Unsolved problems

Non-interactiveness of PackageKit

PackageKit only wants to support non-interactive software management tasks. But in some circumstances we need some user input. Especially if you we want to use PackageKit for update-manager we would target a huge variety of users and not only the "average home user".

Debconf

A Dbus viewer for debconf could pipe the questions to the user's desktop. Some packages cannot be installed without confirming a licence which will be displayed using debconf (flash and Sun java).

Stdin/out

Dpkg allows to read and write to the terminal in maintainer scripts. We would have to find a way to get the terminal through dbus too.

File replacement

Before replacing customizations to configuration files the user gets a prompt.

Non persistent backend dameon/cache

For each operation PackageKit creates a new instance of the backend. So we have to reopen the apt cache for each simple search or sate/description query. The solution could be [http://www.enricozini.org//2007/debtags/axi-searchasyoutype.html Enricos xapian database infrastructure] . We would need a hook in libapt to update the xapian cache on cache updates automatically.

Missing software meta information

Because of the different package naming schemas among all distributions there is no common reference to a certain software feature.