PackageKit purpose?

[Bryn M. Reeves]

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On 03/14/2012 12:10 PM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> What exactly is the purpose of PackageKit?

It's an abstraction over various package management and dependency
solving backends. The website has lots of information:

http://www.packagekit.org/

> Is it essential?

No. You can still use the underlying systems your distribution
provides even if PackageKit is installed. You might hit some
dependency problems trying to remove it but I have never needed to.

> It is used by yum in some way?

No, PackageKit uses yum (or some other dependency solver/updater
depending on what the distribution it's running on uses).

> 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 reported as happening on Ubuntu to plasma-bugs as well:

http://osdir.com/ml/plasma-bugs/2012-01/msg01513.html

And is tracked in KDE bug 292601 (with other reports from Arch users):

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=292601

These are within the first few hits on google for the error message
you quoted (right after your post to fedora-kde last month).

Regards,
Bryn.
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