Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 25th Jun 2008 22:31 UTC, submitted by Rahul
Earlier this week, we reported on the Berlin Packaging API, an effort to consolidate the various different packaging formats and managers in the Linux world. Many compared this new effort to PackageKit, and today Linux.com is running an article detailing what PackageKit exactly is, with a few quotes from the project's lead developer, Richard Hughes.
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Member since:2005-07-09
"how exactly does that help anything.
Personally, I would prefer one authorative standard instead of another layer that may bring bloat and slowing down abstraction to where it shouldn't be. That should be possible, basically. "
The problem is, you can't control all the places KDE and GNOME get deployed, namely Gentoo, FreeBSD, Solaris, and even Windows. PackageKit at least provides some hope that a unified UI can be used. That being said, it seems to be inferior to Synaptic or gnome-app-install on Ubuntu, so it'll have to mature a bit before it can be a true replacement.
Member since:2006-02-04
PackageKit at least provides some hope that a unified UI can be used.
not really though. I mean it's not like there was anyone stopping people from porting the gui portion of synaptic or yum to different packagemanagers or heck porting packagmanagers to different package formats see apt-rpm, hell pclinuxos is rpm based and uses synaptic.
its still only unified if everyone ports packagekit to their packagemanager (pacman, portage, ports, msi, pkg etc) AND sticks to the "official" packagekit UI- which as it doesn't support debconf, or repo management, and i suspect ebuilds are right out- seems unlikely.
Member since:
2006-10-08
As far as I understand, PackageKit simply adds a new layer to the system's native package manager (for example, apt, very famous in Linux), so installation process can be controlled with a kind of agnosia what has to be done exactly.
Personally, I would prefer one authorative standard instead of another layer that may bring bloat and slowing down abstraction to where it shouldn't be. That should be possible, basically.