Pkg resource needs a maintained backend

[purpleidea]

Some bad news...

@hughsie seems to be not maintaining packagekit anymore...

https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2019/02/14/packagekit-is-dead-long-live-well-something-else/

Our pkg resource is backed by this, and tbh, I think it's a great solution. So we have to think about the future, and if someone will step up and continue maintaining this, or if we have to do the horrible task of re-writing our pkg resource to support multiple backends ourselves, or add multiple resources like pkg:dnf and pkg:apt and so on...

Discussion and thoughts welcome!

[hughsie]

Note, PK isn't going away, it's just in maintainance mode. No need to panic.

[roidelapluie]

Then maybe you should change the title of the blog post..

[thkoch2001]

For reference, these are some issues in PackageKit that @purpleidea opened and mentioned in a blog post:

• Resolve should also return a "newest" flag in addition to "installed" PackageKit/PackageKit#116 - Resolve should also return a "newest" flag in addition to "installed"
• dnf commands don't cause signals in packagekit PackageKit/PackageKit#110 - dnf commands don't cause signals in packagekit
• Discerning between a file and a folder in the files signal is impossible? PackageKit/PackageKit#117 - Discerning between a file and a folder in the files signal is impossible?
• On Debian, the GetFiles method only works when pkg is installed PackageKit/PackageKit#118 - On Debian, the GetFiles method only works when pkg is installed

[purpleidea]

@thkoch2001 Thank you for the nice summary! Know anyone that might be interested in hacking on any of these or helping to maintain packagekit? I think it's one of those rare (somewhat unloved) gems that's really worth saving and investing in.