Overview of Jockey replacement; options for Kubuntu?

[Jonathan Thomas]

Hi,

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 1:23 AM, Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hello Jonathan,
>
> Jonathan Thomas [2012-05-25  9:09 -0400]:
>> I think that we'd rather not use PackageKit (for Kubuntu at least).
>
> Please note that it just provides a PackageKit API. We don't use the
> actual PackageKit in Ubuntu as well, but the python-aptdaemon.pkcompat
> wrapper. Kubuntu does the same.

This is incorrect, Kubuntu does not use aptdaemon at all, and doing so
would bring in a considerable amount of GTK libraries, not to mention
yet another apt implementation. If at all I possible, I would like to
write a QApt backend for ubuntu-drivers-common.

>
> This provides an upstream friendly API, so that our GUIs for driver
> detection do not have to stay distro specific for all times. However,
> you don't have to use it, of course.

Currently it's being dragged in by nvidia-common, so it's not exactly
optional if you have an nvidia card...

>
>> We already have python-apt and QApt as part of the default Kubuntu
>> install, so having a third apt worker implementation would be
>> undesirable. Could the new jockey communicate with a "what
>> provides-helper" written with libqapt that uses DBus for
>> communication, and use the qaptworker for running installs if I were
>> to implement such a helper?
>
> ubuntu-drivers-common also provides a simple custom API:
>
>  UbuntuDrivers.detect.system_driver_packages()
>
>  → give me all driver packages for this system
>
>  UbuntuDrivers.detect.packages_for_modalias(apt_cache, modalias)
>
>  → give me the driver package(s) for this piece of hardware
>
> which you can use and wrap however you like.
>
>> >  * Kubuntu implements a similar (or their own) design using the
>> >   ubuntu-drivers-common API in the KDE control center as an embedded
>> >   tab. Then we can also drop jockey-kde.
>> ... then I think it would be beneficial to write a KConfig Module so
>> that it could be integrated as a sub-page of the "Display and Monitor"
>> page in KDE's System Settings. I attempted to write a Jockey frontend
>> for this a few years back, but was foiled due to the multithreading in
>> jockey not playing nice with the KDE plugin apis.
>
> That could work better now. The "basic" API (system_driver_packages()
> and packages_for_modalias()) does not use anything fancy like threads,
> D-BUS, async, etc, just plain python-apt.
>
> I agree.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Martin
> --
> Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
> Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
>
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