PackageKit in Fedora 15 (beta)

[Kevin Kofler]

Florian Festi wrote:
> I think if anybody can come up with a exact description how they should
> look like and how they should work and can create some evidence that
> this is want we need and want implementing them is not the problem[*].
> Until now no one has come up with a proposal and enough confidence.

The proposal is this:

We would have 3 levels of dependencies:
Requires: = always required
Recommends: = required by default
Suggests: = not required by default

In yum, you would have 3 possible settings for "yum install/update" behavior 
wrt. soft dependencies:
1. Ignore all Recommends and Suggests.
2. Treat Recommends as Requires, ignore Suggests. (The default.)
3. Treat both Recommends and Suggests as Requires.
The setting would be set in yum.conf and could be overridden through a 
command-line argument, kinda like how --enablerepo works.

For "yum remove", you'd have 2 possible settings:
1. Ignore all soft dependencies during remove. (The default.)
2. Treat soft dependencies using the setting for install/update.
Again, the setting would be set in yum.conf and could be overridden through 
a command-line argument.
(The rationale for the proposed default is that it allows removing unwanted 
soft dependencies easily.)

In gnome-packagekit and KPackageKit, you'd have a dropdown in the settings 
to set the first yum option and a checkbox for the second.

The evidence that this is what we need: This is basically how all the 
existing implementations (deb, rpm5 etc.) I know of work and they've been 
found to work quite well for the distros using them.

Additional features such as conditional dependencies, reverse dependencies 
etc. might be useful too, but they're really orthogonal to this proposal.

        Kevin Kofler