Where do I download it?

Precompiled Packages

Your distribution may already have compiled packages that are much easier to install.

Conary: Yes, just run: sudo conary update PackageKit gnome-packagekit
Fedora 8: Yes, just install this repository file and run: yum install PackageKit gnome-packagekit (as root)
Others: Probably not, although you can compile from source. See below for more details.

Released Versions

Released versions are found on people.freedesktop.org.

Version		Date
0.1.0		2007-10-16

Dependencies

The actual PackageKit daemon needs:

glib 2.14.0
dbus newer than 1.1.3 (20070819 or later)
dbus-glib 0.74
libnm 0.6.4
polkit-dbus 0.5
polkit-grant 0.5

gnome-packagekit will need all the usual GNOME libs as well. Just make sure you install PackageKit before gnome-packagekit!

Compiling the latest code

You can get the latest code from the public git repo on freedesktop.

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/packagekit
git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/gnome-packagekit

If you want to commit changes or a new backend, then please email the mailing list and we can give you access to a developer server. The developer server is always up to date, and the anonymous git is synced about twice a day. Having a two tier server lets developers review code for correctness and security problems before it's used in the real world.

Adding backends to PackageKit

PackageKit itself is an abstract daemon, the only bits that are distro specific are the backends.
To make PackageKit work on a new distribution, you have to write a "backend" which is basically a shim layer from the distro tool to packagekitd. A backend can have one or more threads and also spawn other processes.
See the developer information here for loads more information.

Backends do not have to be complete; often they just contain basic functionality to install and remove but do not provide dependency or file lists for example. For instance:

yum (95% complete)
conary (70% complete)
apt (40% complete)
box (10% complete)
pacman/alpm (10% complete)

We need people to create backends, and then package (pardon the pun) PackageKit and gnome-packagekit for more distributions. I think it's important that installing and updating software should be as easy as possible.

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