[Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] packagekit-backend-presolve as an attempt to provide installing activity dependencies on demand in order to support GNU/Linux distribution agnostic launch from app stores

[Aleksey Lim]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 06:56:53PM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> Hi Aleksey,
> 
> Did the ever happen?

Yes, the working backend is packaged in SweetsDistribution.
The trunk version can be found in

    http://download.sugarlabs.org/packages/SweetsDistribution:/Factory/Fedora-14/

Implementation details can be found on

    http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Platform_Team/packagekit-backend-presolve#Implementation

> Also was there plans for a control panel update
> interface to package kit as well as the back end bits to support .xo
> files with package kit?

There are design and implementation points that make such functionality
either not so useful or even impossible:

* backend is designed to be as lightweight as possible, thus,
  it doesn't keep local packages db to reuse...

* presolve server, here Sugar Network (see implementation details)...

* to implement only installation (mostly activity dependencies), and,
  update already installed (mostly via the same backend) packages:

    http://node.sugarlabs.org/packages/OLPC/11.3.1/pygame
    http://node-devel.sugarlabs.org/packages/SweetsDistribution:0.94:SugarNetwork/Fedora-14/updates

In other words, there are no plans to have CP PackageKit component.
Sugar Network client(s) plays this role for installation (though,
it is impossible to install exact package, maybe such functionality
will be added at the end). The system update is assumed to be unattended
(the regular CLI way with `pkcon update` still works).

-- 
Aleksey