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: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:2005-07-06
Porting an existing gui is a mess in many cases. Packagekit.org has a presentation detailing the problems. Also there is nothing stopping people from running the PackageKit GUI and having their native package manager gui installed in parallel for more advanced tasks. That is the approach used by many distributions. Note that ebuilds are getting to be a supported backend via a Google SoC project
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/userrel/soc/
Fedora and Foresight Linux already include PackageKit by default and nearly all the mainstream distribution are going to do it by the next version.
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Member since:
2005-07-09
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.