PackageKit purpose?

[Kevin Martin]

On 03/14/2012 11:06 AM, Bryn M. Reeves wrote:
> 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.

FWIW, I just removed PackageKit from my system running rawhide and the list of dependent packages that also had to be removed were:

Removing:
 PackageKit                                   x86_64                 0.7.3-1.fc18                    @rawhide                 2.8 M
Removing for dependencies:
 PackageKit-command-not-found                 x86_64                 0.7.3-1.fc18                    @rawhide                  46 k
 PackageKit-device-rebind                     x86_64                 0.7.3-1.fc18                    @rawhide                  15 k
 PackageKit-glib                              x86_64                 0.7.3-1.fc18                    @rawhide                 412 k
 PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin                  x86_64                 0.7.3-1.fc18                    @rawhide                  14 k
 PackageKit-yum                               x86_64                 0.7.3-1.fc18                    @rawhide                 306 k
 PackageKit-yum-plugin                        x86_64                 0.7.3-1.fc18                    @rawhide                 2.5 k
 abrt-desktop                                 x86_64                 2.0.7-4.fc17                    @rawhide                 0.0 
 gnome-packagekit                             x86_64                 3.3.5-2.fc17                    @rawhide                  11 M
 gnome-settings-daemon                        x86_64                 3.3.91-1.fc18                   @rawhide                 5.0 M
 libreport-plugin-bodhi                       x86_64                 2.0.8-6.fc17                    @rawhide                  15 k
 paprefs                                      x86_64                 0.9.9-11.fc18                   @rawhide                 243 k


So perhaps some of the dependency issues have been resolved in later releases or perhaps there's some problem with your rpm database
that's showing other package dependencies that aren't real (is that even possible?).

Kevin