[Mageia-dev] RPM features/issues/wishlist

[Per Øyvind Karlsen]

2011/10/15 Donald Stewart <watersnowrock at gmail.com>:
> The thing about packagekit, well most graphical frontends package
> management (pm) is that they dont really need to be that functional.
I pretty much agree on that, but I'm not sure if everyone does though..

> By that I mean that yes it is great to be able to query nearly all of
> urpmi's features in rpmdrake, however, isn't it much faster to just do
> urpmf --files file-name. I guess what I am getting at is that as long
> as basic functionality, eg searching, add/remove and repo
> configurations are handled by the pm and done properly, ie not causing
> any breakage, then I feel that it is fair enough to say that more
> advanced functions should be done on the cl, firstly because that way
> is easier, secondly because that way encourages less breakage from
> just point and click and see.
> One feature of rpmdrake that i do really like is that you can
> configure it to search by {name,description.......} this helps a lot
> for finding software that you don't know the specifics for before
> hand, and the only real case where a gui frontend comes into its own
> for pm so I guess that as long as that is supported, with being able
> to see arch, and release numbers, I am happy to have a basic pm
> system.
IIRC packagekit supports this and I think support was already in place for it,
or I might've added support for it if it wasn't, while also adding
support for some
additional "filters" (packagekit's different ways of categorizing metadata to
search through) as well.
Some of these might've been tied to Mandriva's layout and repository naming
etc. due to (current) lack of support for the necessary information to more
correctly identify this.
I'd like to look into extending the current metadata format to add
ehr.. metadata
about the metadata for this in Mandriva, the relevance of this to
Mageia of course
depends on actual interest in adopting this of course, so if anyone
has any interest
in coordinating anything and discussing this subject, this interest
should be expressed
ASAP as the changes should ideally last for a while and not frequently change.

I see proposals of adopting the repomd xml format used by yum on Mageia's list,
for Mandriva I'm not really considering this at all as I don't really
see any real benefits,
while I clearly see drawbacks of it's regarding bloat affecting the
size and speed of
loading it, whereas for URPM the synthesis metadata is very light,
incredibly easy and
fast to load and parse. I see some issues with the additional metadata
used by urpmi that's
stored in xml though (ie. files.xml.lzma only listing all files with
no information about whether
being directory, symlink, regular file or any other attributes that
would make it more usable
for things beyond just informational purposes to user)..
I'm digressing with too lenghty discussions of matters that might not
be all that interesting
to everyone, so I guess I'll rather continue covering this on the wiki
pages in stead.. ;)

Anyways, for packagekit, I did most of the work back in May though and
haven't touched it
much since, I guess it  wouldn't hurt revisiting it, but you're likely
to be able to get around to
take a look and confirm/report any bugs/(missing) features before me
if you have the interest
yourself.
I'm personally not really using packagekit myself ATM, so I have to
rely on any potential bugs
getting reported back to me.. ;)

--
Regards,
Per Øyvind