AppStream, Discover and metadata

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wednesday, November 11, 2015 07:08:39 PM Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> 2015-11-11 7:09 GMT+01:00 Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com>:
> > [...]
> > My personal experience with PackageKit + Apper was very poor.  It was my
> > experience that PackageKit's apt integration was just a thin graft on top
> > of (or under depending on your perspective) something designed to work
> > with RPM and really didn't work at all well in Kubuntu.
> 
> When did you try that last? Since on Debian we never had such issues,
> since the switch to the aptcc backend, which performs much better than
> the old Python-based apt backend.
> PK itself is in no way RPM specific, in fact it even has
> Debian-specific facilities built in (e.g. for Debconf support).
> It is, however, relatively basic and does not support some advanced
> features (like setting packages on hold) - but that's something one
> doesn't do in a software center anyway.

It was several years ago (probably 3 - 5, but I don't recall).  I don't have 
any more recent experience, so I'm sure it could have changed.

> > I don't know if it was because
> > of the Apper design or inherent in PackageKit, but it had it's own package
> > cache that seemed to be frequently out of sync with apt (note: aptitude
> > does/did something similar and associated problems have caused me to stay
> > far away from it as well).
> 
> Where did you get that idea from? PK, apt and aptcc never had their
> own package cache, and always accessed the apt cache directly. There
> is/was a cache for .desktop-file-->package associations, but that one
> was only used to display a "launch application" dialog after
> installing (and it didn't matter much if that cache was out of sync).

Back when I tried it, I regularly saw cases where there were updates that apt 
was aware of that apper was not.  Also, I recall that the only way to 
determine if additional packages would need to be installed along with a 
package upgrade was to do a dry run upgrade internally and then if it failed, 
additional packages were needed.

As mentioned above, this was a long time ago and I have not kept up to see if 
things have changed.

> > In my limited free time I've been working on making QApt + Muon work
> > better in Debian and if there's a newer thing in that direction to test,
> > I'd be glad to test it on Debian.
> 
> Please do, but please also use a recent version of PK and QPK - the
> version in Ubuntu has been outdated for years, which will be fixed
> this cycle as I was told.

I'm using whatever is in Debian.

Scott K