Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: eselect_zenity: alpha eselect GUI

["Rémi Cardona" <remi@gentoo.org>]

Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> I'd like to talk in more detail about this with someone, but nobody on 
> #gentoo-guis seemed to know why PackageKit wouldn't work for the simple 
> (no USE flag changes) case. Should I try the -guis mailing list instead?

Looking at the current feature set of PackageKit, there's no reason we
couldn't add support for Gentoo.

However, PackageKit is really meant for binary distros, and some design
choices really rely on that. For instance, the PackageKit tray icon will
ping the backend for updates every 30 minutes or so (default value),
while this is perfectly fine for apt or yum where downloading the list
of available updates takes about 2 seconds (just to check the HTTP
headers to see if something has changed). Obviously, this can't be kept
as is for our case.

Also, PackageKit has its own conventions when it comes to packages being
available for one platform. Again, its model fits right with binary
distros and would require some major tweaking to fit our model, but I
don't think it's out of our reach.

Maybe one could start writing the search backend and the install/remove
backend. That would be a nice step in the right direction :)

Cheers,

Rémi
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