AppStream, Discover and metadata

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday, November 17, 2015 07:42:26 PM Aleix Pol wrote:
> 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
> >> 
> >> --
> >> kubuntu-devel mailing list
> >> kubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
> >> Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
> >> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/kubuntu-devel> 
> > 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

For Debian, I'd appreciate it if you would pick up this discussion on debian-
qt-kde at lists.debian.org so we can do what needs to be done to get qapt + 
appstream working there.  I'll be glad to work on that.

Scott K