Interviews/PackageKit

PackageKit aims to take the pain out of the package management on GNU/Linux systems and create a system that can compete with Windows and Mac. Development is proceeding at a rapid pace and it is set to be available in Fedora 9. To find out more, we talked to  Richard Hughes, project creator, and   Robin Norwood , the Fedora feature owner; as always, you can catch some screenshots at the end!

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Developer Interview


 Richard Hughes 

Location: Guildford, Surrey, UK

Profession: Electronic Engineer (MEng)

IRC Nick: hughsie

Website: http://www.hughsie.com

Interviewed by: JonathanRoberts



 Robin Norwood 

Location: Raleigh, NC

Profession: Coder

IRC Nick: rnorwood

Interviewed by:  Jonathan Roberts

What motivated you to start the  PackageKit project ?

Richard Hughes: Every distro re-invents the same type of package-management tools, and generally does it badly. Package management front ends are nearly always badly localized and translated as they are distro specific. Fedora has pup and pirut, Ubuntu has gnome-app-install and update-manager, and Suse has libzypp command line tools and the zen updater. The other distros basically throw some kind of GUI on top of the package tool rather than look at the use-cases and user interaction studies. To compete with Windows XP and OSX we need to improve what we offer for Linux, even with the wildly different systems such as gentoo with ebuilds and Fedora with binary rpms.

Robin Norwood: I couldn't agree more. Also, I'd add that application developers who want to install add ons but still play nicely with a distributions packaging system could benefit from a unified packaging API.

'''Could you elaborate a little bit about the work you've done with user interaction studies and use-cases?'''

RN: Personally, my only contribution to UI is to say what I don't like. I do know that, like a lot of open source projets, we could really use some UI/interaction experts.

How does it differ to the existing solutions?

RH: Package Kit is all about. The Klik idea seems to be 'one program, one file', sort of like Mac OS X's application bundles. This is an interesting idea, but it doesn't really work within the operating system's package management system at all. You have to have an entirely different system for getting security fixes and updates, for one thing. I have no idea how well the Klik folks have succeeded at this, but I think a solution that works within the powerful package management systems that Linux distributions already have is required.

Other projects, like Smart PM, take things from another angle. Smart tries to replace other package managers like yum wholesale. I think the problem you run into there is, until Smart or something like it replaces all of the features of the package manager it wants to replace, it will be almost impossible to get it into a given distribution. Package Kit doesn't provide a UI for.

I think Package Kit and gnome-packagekit are already in rawhide, and we've heard lots of success stories. All of the core stuff works with a mostly-complete yum back end, and now we need to concentrate on optimizations and front end user interactions.

'''Do you ever hope to see it taken up as the default package management system in Fedora?'''

RH: I hope so. We'll still need pirut in anaconda for package selection, but it would be good to fully integrate Package Kit is shipped by default in Foresight Linux and the GNOME Developer Kit. There's also interest from Ubuntu, openSUSE, openSolaris, Mandriva, OpenMOKO and a few more that we can't announce yet.

'''And perhaps, to finish, you could tell us a little bit about yourselves? What got you interested in free software originally? What do you like to do with your spare time when you're not working with computers?'''

RH: Well, I'm 25 years old and graduated this year from Surrey University with a Masters in Electronic Engineering. I work for a large defense company in Kent, UK. I enjoy eating good food and playing football.

My first contribution to free software was a kernel patch to fix non-UTF8 encoding on CIFS shares, and then I moved onto adding power management stuff in HAL. I then created gnome-power-manager and OHM, and then finally Package Kit



The preferences screen for Package Kit's abillity to work with Policy Kit's ability to queue different package management jobs

For more screenshots see http://www.packagekit.org/pk-screenshots.html