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List:       opensuse-factory
Subject:    Re: [opensuse-factory] To PackageKit or not to PackageKit
From:       Jon Nelson <jnelson-suse () jamponi ! net>
Date:       2012-11-01 14:32:43
Message-ID: CAKuK5J12_4b09Dpc6b7QDHbrF-AXtEyKB_Xn0XHfhkBWdTbCcQ () mail ! gmail ! com
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The following is worth what you paid for it:

I've been a loyal SuSE (and, later, openSUSE) user since 9.3, and I've been
doing the whole Linux thing since 1994. I've seen package management
interfaces come and go. For a long time, smart (smartpm) was my preferred
choice, as it *vastly* outperformed rug and others (incl. the early
releases of zypper). Then zypper finally stabilized and things were pretty
good.

Then came along PackageKit. From a design perspective, it seemed to be the
way of the future, but from a practical perspective it just didn't live up.
Release after release there were bugs (and there still are), it was *slow*
and resource hungry (and still is), not as capable (still true), and now
the version in use is out of date. I got used to removing packagekit* as
the very first step after installation, and relying instead on zypper
(manual and cron). Now we are at 12.2 and packagekit *still* doesn't work
quite right.

Please consider:
*after* 12.2 was released, 'pkcon' still didn't work on half of the
machines I've got (since resolved)

*after* 12.2 was released, packagekit still had architecture problems
(installing i586 on x86_64)

We *still* don't have an especially informative packagekit interface. The
feedback on download progress is useless, overall progress isn't present,
and by recent discussion there are still significant issues with threading,
requiring *at least* one more distro release to resolve, perhaps more.

Choosing on machine that still has packagekit installed, I just ran "dmesg
| grep segfault".  Care to guess what I found?  PK-Backend. I have that
machine set to auto-update and auto-install by way of packagekit, but it
doesn't work sometimes. Can I tell why? No.

Even when it *does* work it seems to chew up CPU and take a *really* long
time to do... anything.

It seems to me that - while packagekit's design and goals are laudable in
and of themselves, at some point you have to consider the practical effects
of these decisions on your users. The reputation of a flakey, troublesome,
irritating software update interface is well-deserved. Is it better than it
was? Yes. Does it work well? Not for everybody. Not for me. And - this is a
critical question - am I better off *now* than I was 5 years ago (in this
respect)? Not really.

zypper works. Today. I am not suggesting that all work on packagekit be
abandoned, but from a purely pragmatic perspective, just exactly how many
developer hours would it take to
a) resolve the packagekit <-> libzypp issues
b) update to the more recent packagekit backend
c) *stay in sync* with upstream packagekit
b) maintain the packagekit stack until such time as doing so is no longer
necessary (a better alternative - whatever that may be - exists)

as compared to
a) provide a notification interface that interfaces with zypper/yast2 that
identifies when updates are ready
b) maintain that software until such time as doing so is no longer
necessary (a better alternative - whatever that may be - exists)

That's my rant and I'm sticking to it. Please do not take offense, for none
was intended. Instead, please take a step back and consider things from the
perspective of a user that has not had a problem-free packagekit install
*ever*.

--
Jon
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