PackageKit

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Where do I download it?

Your distribution may already have compiled packages that are much easier to install. Conary: Yes, just do sudo conary update-all Fedora 8: Yes, just install this repo and do yum install PackageKit gnome-packagekit Others: Probably not, although you can compile from source. See the download page for more details.

PackageKit itself is an abstract daemon, the only bits that are distro specific are the backends. To make PackageKit work on your unknown 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 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 a backend, and then package (pardon the pun) PackageKit and gnome-packagekit for distributions. I think it's important that installing and updating software should be as easy as possible.

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