Hi! Some more information about what I'm doing at time to make the Software-Center cross-distro and usable with PackageKit. At time I am in a pretty intense exam phase, so there are a little less changes happening - more will be done after my biggest two exams on 5th July are over. Of course working hasn't stopped. Here's a short summary (I'll tell some things again for better understanding) The key element to get a working Software Center is PackageKit. When I started the project, SC was incredibly slow. After some modifications, it is now usable, which means that it will run with acceptable speed. However, it is still much slower than it's native aptd version. The current design of PackageKit allows only sequential processing of transactions, meaning if one transaction (InstallPackages()) is running, you can't run another one in parallel (GetDetails()). This results in that odd case that users will not be able to browse the software catalog while software is installed. To solve that issue, I introduced the package cache, a SQLite cache of all installed packages and their details. This worked well, but also had all issues of a cache and was not very elegant and generally disliked by many people, including me. So we looked for other solutions and decided to implement "parallel transactions" after a longer discussion. "Parallel transactions" means that you will be able to run some transactions, e.g. everything which reads the cache, in parallel to others, for example one which installs packages. This will enable us to not only show package details while installing stuff, but also to fire many read transactions at the same time at get them processed without delay. The final speed of PK will - of course - depend on how well the backend is written. Downside of this solution is that all backends have to be threadsafe (or created processes and do IPC) and that this feature is non-trivial to implement. Richard Hughes (PackageKit maintainer) and I drafted the specifications of parallel transactions, including some test-cases. Essential for planning the implementation was that a running transactions may never ever block existing ones. (Avoiding situations like everything is waiting to release locks) After planning, implementation started, where we now completely broke backend API. First idea way to create one PkBackend instance per PkTransaction, but after we did many parts of the implementation and I had a working prototype already, Richard stated that initializing one new backend per transaction is a bad idea and a big overhead. Another problem which I had discussed with Daniel (aptcc backend maintainer) before was that with this approach backends can't share cache resources, as they don't have control over the running threads. At first, we wanted to do a PkBackendPool, which would've contained a pool of "activated" backend instances, but once again we avoided the easy way to do it the right way(tm) (at least that's our impression :P). New solution is that there will be only one backend, but multiple PkBackendJobs, which are submitted to the backend and executed. A backend job is something like "install X,Y" or "get me the details of package X". Implementation is going on right now, and Richard is really amazing with that, as he already updated some of the most difficult parts (I'm writing exams, so not much time ^^). Of course this is still not done yet. There will be a PackageKit release of the new 0.8.x series we've been working on the last weeks. This release will already contain many of the SoC improvements, but I'd like to warn you not to use it in stable distributions. As soon as that is done, the PkBackendJob thing will be merged & tweaked. - A lot of work from backend author will be needed too. After PK is working properly (and probably even before all pieces are at place) I'll go into SC again to fix some issues which were bothering me a long time already. At time, PK is the number-one priority, because without doing the work on PackageKit, a well-working Software-Center is impossible. I haven't seen that coming when I started my SoC, but hey, the changes are awesome! Many other projects will also benefit from them, as there are already some other efforts to write a SC on top of PK. (but they're all in a pretty early state) Next time, I won't write that much text, I somehow always feel the need to explain every single step - probably a sideeffect from working on cross-distro projects :-) Expect some more news and a blogpost soon after I finished exams :-) (I wanted have written a blogpost a month ago already, and the text is nearly done...) If you have questions, please ask or catch me on IRC (ximion, Freenode) - I'll be 100% available efter 6th July again :-) Cheers and thanks for reading! Matthias -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org