AppStream, Discover and metadata

[Aleix Pol]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 1:22 AM, Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 8:24 PM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:
>> 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
>>
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>
> IMHO Apper usage is completely unrelated to this transition. In fact,
> I doubt that Apper is up to speed yet. The port to Qt5 is very recent
> and it will lack features that an apt-centered alternative can offer
> (such as Muon or Synaptic).
>
> Aleix

Since this has been quite silent for the last days, I decided to move
on and port the QApt backend to AppStream.
It's in a qapt+appstream branch:
http://commits.kde.org/discover/534290759ae964cd7b47d325019f08a5b507e29e

Problem: AppStream database in willy is broken and lacks quite some
information (and so does willy+1, but to a lesser extent). This means
that if I merge this patch in master (which I want to do), Plasma/5.5
Discover on Kubuntu Willy won't work.

Could somebody please look into updating/fixing the AppStream in willy?
For reference: using this ppa solves all of the problems:
add-apt-repository ppa:ximion/packagekit

Aleix