F20 Self Contained Change: Application Installer

[Jan Zelený]

On 15. 7. 2013 at 07:47:06, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> 
> > > Yes, if you want to put it that way. We want to use a backend that can
> > > supported the desired user experience.
> > > 
> > > The hawkey stack is groomed to replace yum anyway. All we're asking is
> > > that we can use it early, so we can provide the testing exposure they
> > > need and ensure that hawkey does actually support the things we need.
> > > 
> > > Without that, there's a very real danger that hawkey/dnf end up
> > > producing a perfect copy of yum (including all of the problems)...
> > 
> > Don't worry, that's not gonna happen. Hawkey has been built on top of
> > libsolv library that implements a different solver than yum uses. Under
> > no circumstances will this change. The more likely scenario is that
> > gnome- software/PackageKit will be forced by the policy to use the old
> > yum which will
> > make future adoption of dnf much more difficult.
> 
> So, do I understand you correctly that you as Yum/Dnf guys would be ok to
> have a different backend for GUI and non-GUI use cases as mentioned in
> this thread and agreed by FESCo previously? I'd be more than happy to
> see your sign off for this change and state this too there.

Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. Obviously there would be a 
"problem" with both programs offering different combinations of packages in some 
cases. But combined with the fact that the use case/target group of users 
(applications vs. packages) is different for both, I don't think it would be 
that much of an issue.

Back to my original comment, switching your SW Management application is a 
painful process and I seriously doubt it can be done completely at once - 
consider depending pieces like plugins, Anaconda and PK. Therefore I was 
hoping for incremental adoption where possible. With that in mind, the optimal 
solution from my perspective would be to implement hawkey backend in PK and 
let it coexist with current yum backend until yum is replaced by dnf. Another 
option would be to make the new PK (or just the backend if possible) optional 
for now and make it default together with dnf replacing yum. However I 
strongly suspect that neither of these two proposals are acceptable for 
Richard.

Thoughts?

Thanks
Jan