Linked by Rahul on Sat 11th Oct 2008 01:53 UTC
PolishLinux has an interview with the KPackageKit developers. PackageKit is a abstraction layer over the different Linux package management tools. It is primarily designed to unify the graphical tools and provide a consistent distribution neutral framework for application developers to install add-ons as well. This project was initiated and continues to be maintained by Red Hat developer Richard Hughes who also wrote the initial GNOME frontend to it, called gpk-application. Multiple backends currently exist and it is the default for Fedora and Foresight Linux already. Other distributions including Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, and Gentoo are actively participating in the development of different backends. A KDE interface has been under rapid development recently and just did a 1.0 release last week. This interview provides more details.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
they want to present a common interface to the user no matter what distro they happen to be sitting in front of?
while commendable, i dont think this fixes the real issue, that of being able to put one file/link up on some webpage and expect it to install across distros.
common dependencies notation would help a bit, but when one have distros that feel like overruling the original developers in how something should be packaged (iirc, debian slices kde into 1001 different small packages, when the original setup is 5-6 larger ones around specific feature sets), and apply distro specific patches rather wait for them to be processed up stream, it can quite well turn into a never ending mess.