After alot of struggling with upstream python wrapper which had alot of incompleteness in its implementation which also seemed to be discontinued upstream which affects our approach. We need to implement a wrapper by our self around PackageKit dbus interface for interfacing with PackageKit service, some parts can be ripped from the "incomplete" python wrapper tho.
To use PackageKit as the package installer the system needs to provide dbus, dbus python wrapper, packagekit + dist specific package manager backend, depending of what kind of installation the preinstallation of this packages varies. Here follows a summarization of different installations: rhel 6.2 server - minimal installation ------------------------------------------------------- dbus-python-0.83.0 rhel 6.2 server - basic installation ------------------------------------------------------- dbus-1.2.24, dbus-python-0.83 rhel 6.2 server - desktop installation ------------------------------------------------------- PackageKit-0.5.8, dbus-1.2.24, dbus-python-0.83.0 sles11 sp1 - normal installation ------------------------------------------------------- PackageKit-0.3.14, dbus-1-1.2.10, dbus-1-python-0.83.0 ubuntu 12.04 server alpha2 ------------------------------------------------------- dbus-1.3, python-dbus-1.0
I have tested my pkgkit prototype on tl.cendio.se within a thinlincsession, works if executed as root, however the polkit dbus authentication mechanism fails without notice and execution as normal user doesn't bring up a "auth" dialog.
Created attachment 427 [details] packagekit prototype
Moving this bug to future due to that the different distributions does not have this as default in basic installation level, hopefully this is true for the future and we can then revisit the work done on this bug.
PackageKit is in some weird limbo right now. It is the backend that GNOME Software uses, so it's fairly well used. However the PackageKit developer considers it abandoned and is focusing his efforts on Flatpak right now.
