PackageKit purpose?

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Wed, 2012-03-14 at 12:10 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> What exactly is the purpose of PackageKit?
> Is it essential?

No.

> It is used by yum in some way?

Other way round. It uses yum. It's an attempt at a "universal" interface
that's independent of the underlying package management system. On
Fedora, it's essentially a GUI for yum, but not the only one.

> I'm asking because I get an error message
> -------------------------------
> Fetch Job Error - Plasma Desktop Shell
> 
> Unknown error. (Unable to fetch item from backend)
> -------------------------------
> whenever I login or wake from hibernation,
> and I saw somewhere a suggestion that this might be
> related to PackageKit.

It's telling you there's a problem with yum. Try running yum directly
for more info (possibly some repo is down).

poc