The following is worth what you paid for it: I've been a loyal SuSE (and, later, openSUSE) user since 9.3, and I've been doing the whole Linux thing since 1994. I've seen package management interfaces come and go. For a long time, smart (smartpm) was my preferred choice, as it *vastly* outperformed rug and others (incl. the early releases of zypper). Then zypper finally stabilized and things were pretty good. Then came along PackageKit. From a design perspective, it seemed to be the way of the future, but from a practical perspective it just didn't live up. Release after release there were bugs (and there still are), it was *slow* and resource hungry (and still is), not as capable (still true), and now the version in use is out of date. I got used to removing packagekit* as the very first step after installation, and relying instead on zypper (manual and cron). Now we are at 12.2 and packagekit *still* doesn't work quite right. Please consider: *after* 12.2 was released, 'pkcon' still didn't work on half of the machines I've got (since resolved) *after* 12.2 was released, packagekit still had architecture problems (installing i586 on x86_64) We *still* don't have an especially informative packagekit interface. The feedback on download progress is useless, overall progress isn't present, and by recent discussion there are still significant issues with threading, requiring *at least* one more distro release to resolve, perhaps more. Choosing on machine that still has packagekit installed, I just ran "dmesg | grep segfault". Care to guess what I found? PK-Backend. I have that machine set to auto-update and auto-install by way of packagekit, but it doesn't work sometimes. Can I tell why? No. Even when it *does* work it seems to chew up CPU and take a *really* long time to do... anything. It seems to me that - while packagekit's design and goals are laudable in and of themselves, at some point you have to consider the practical effects of these decisions on your users. The reputation of a flakey, troublesome, irritating software update interface is well-deserved. Is it better than it was? Yes. Does it work well? Not for everybody. Not for me. And - this is a critical question - am I better off *now* than I was 5 years ago (in this respect)? Not really. zypper works. Today. I am not suggesting that all work on packagekit be abandoned, but from a purely pragmatic perspective, just exactly how many developer hours would it take to a) resolve the packagekit <-> libzypp issues b) update to the more recent packagekit backend c) *stay in sync* with upstream packagekit b) maintain the packagekit stack until such time as doing so is no longer necessary (a better alternative - whatever that may be - exists) as compared to a) provide a notification interface that interfaces with zypper/yast2 that identifies when updates are ready b) maintain that software until such time as doing so is no longer necessary (a better alternative - whatever that may be - exists) That's my rant and I'm sticking to it. Please do not take offense, for none was intended. Instead, please take a step back and consider things from the perspective of a user that has not had a problem-free packagekit install *ever*. -- Jon -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org