[Mageia-dev] RPM features/issues/wishlist

Sat Oct 15 04:05:04 CEST 2011

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
+