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:
2005-11-02
packagekit is an interesting idea, but not entirely new. The nice separation of concerns with a 'neutral' daemon, dbus communication and multiple back ends all sounds good. But, in the end you still must solve the same issues always encountered by package management GUIs and deal with the same issues always found when trying to gloss over the differences between superficially similar back ends.
I don't doubt that you can make it do something useful, but I would prefer a complete GUI for e.g. apt which can be easy to use, easy to understand and allows all or almost all of the power of the command line utility. Having a GUI which implements the lowest common denominator of package management wont make me happy. (Don't try and tell em packagekit somehow solves this problem; it's no better than previous attempts in this area.)
While I'm talking, is anyone else annoyed with the look-at-me-I'm-like-Apple way in which certain recent efforts have adopted the *Kit naming convention? As if choosing this as a name somehow gives your application the usability pluses of OS X. It's strange to see.