Fedora 9 Beta, PackageKit and system-config-printer

[Robin Norwood]

On Thu, 20 Mar 2008 04:25:20 +0530
Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> Richard Hughes wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-03-19 at 17:30 -0400, Robin Norwood wrote:
> >> I don't think we want to just put up a UI where you can edit the
> >> various fields that are allowed in a repo config.  As far as I
> >> know, the three biggest use cases are:
> >>
> >> o User installs an rpm that deploys a .repo file
> >> into /etc/yum.repos.d
> >>   - This is pretty good.  The .repo file itself is managed by rpm.
> > 
> > Personally I like this approach as the rpm normally also installs
> > the gpg key needed for this.
> > 
> >> o User downloads a repo file and saves it to /etc/yum.repos.d
> >>   - This is ok, but the user has to save the file as root.  Maybe
> >> if the repo had a mime type that firefox could recognize, and send
> >> the file to PK to deal with?  I don't know if this is a common
> >> enough use case, or something that we want to encourage.
> > 
> > I don't this we want to be saying to random user to put random
> > files as root on their filesystem. A utopia-repo.rpm type rpm is 5
> > minutes work max.
> > 
> >> o The sysadmin deploys .repo files to a bunch of systems using
> >> puppet, or some other config management tool
> >>   - This is fine, too.  PK lets you enable/disable these locally if
> >> needed.
> > 
> > Sure the other problem is with the abstraction. As soon as we add
> > repos (removing is easy) then we start having to deal with
> > mirrorlists and excludes and that sort of thing which is very
> > difficult to abstract.
> > 
> > IMO, the sort of user editing repo files isn't the sort of person
> > who should need a GUI tool...
> 
> I don't "need" a GUI tool for any sort of package management at all.
> It is merely convenient at times to be able to edit repositories via
> one. Things like enabling updates-testing repository to quickly grab
> a new package, enabling a repository for a particular session when it
> is otherwise disabled,

We already cover these use cases.

> pointing to a local mirror or different source
> for a repository, switching between base url and mirror list etc are
> things I do pretty often.

We don't cover this one, and it's a little tricky.  We'd probably like
to stay within the API that yum configuration supplies (ConfigParser),
but, IIRC, the 'baseurl' line is usually commented out in the .repo
files we ship, and I don't think ConfigParser parses comments at
all...I could be wrong though.  This problem is still solvable, but I
wonder how common a use case it really is.  How many individual users
use a local mirror, and configure it by hand, as opposed to site
administrators who probably deploy their configuration with a tool like
puppet or cfengine?

Why do you switch between the base url and mirror list?  Because you
can't find a good mirror?  If so, then I'd argue that yum should have
better detection when a mirror is 'bad', and be more aggressive about
switching to a 'good' mirror.

> In Pirut, I have enabled the media
> repository on some systems too.

Yeah, this is one thing we are still missing.  It's on my list of
things to do.

-RN

-- 
Robin Norwood
Red Hat, Inc.

"The Sage does nothing, yet nothing remains undone."
-Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching