ubuntu-appstore-developers team mailing list archive

[Matthias Klumpp <matthias@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2013/7/3 Sebastian Heinlein <glatzor@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> Am Mittwoch, den 03.07.2013, 15:53 +0200 schrieb Matthias Klumpp:
>
>> P.S: @Sebastian: OT question: Why does Ubuntu need sessioninstaller,
>> if they could simply use gnome-packagekit-session instead? (just out
>> of curiousity)
>
> Again a little bit of history:
> Sessioninstaller was created before aptdaemon gained PackageKit system
> interface support. The initial assumption (before GObject introspection
> was introduced) was that third party clients would use the session
> interface only. So sessioninstaller was an effort to get PackageKit used
> in Ubuntu at all. The system interface was in the first run made for
> "advanced" software management tools, which we already had in place for
> Ubuntu (software-center and update-manager).
I knew that ;-)

> But next to the historical reason there is also a technical one:
> Sessioninstaller provides some unique features compared to
> gnome-packagekit-session. It takes more information into account by
> querying the APT and xapian cache directly. E.g. it can report to the
> user which of the requested codecs will be handled by which package. If
> there is a package which could handle all requested codecs. Which
> package provides the best support for the searched codec. So the best
> codec packages are already pre-selected by sessioninstaller. It contains
> an information about potential patent encumbered code. It makes use of
> the APT xapian index with the added application data of software-center
> to show applications instead of packages.
This indeed makes much sense.and sounds like a good reason to keep it
for now. PK is also able to select the best codec packages, but GPK
does not display license informations, and it also does not have an
application-centric view. We might want to add this to GPK at some
point in future, but this will take time ^^

Cheers,
   Matthias
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