PackageKit available in Debian!

It was a long way to go, but now it’s done: PackageKit is available in Debian Sid!

Packaging has been done by me, but all the credits belong to Richard Hughes and Daniel Nicoletti. Daniel found a way to make use of Debconf in PackageKit and implemented it in KPackageKit, and Richard Hughes did the last steps to make pkcon and GNOME-PackageKit use the new Debconf support.

The missing Debconf support was the biggest blocking thing for most of the Debian devs, so I was unable to get an agreement to accept PackageKit in Debian. But now it’s done and Michael Vogt (APT dev) himself gave his okay to the package.

Since the maintainer of SessionInstaller, an alternative Python implementation of the PackageKit session API also welcomed the inclusion of PK, I think there will be a really well co-existence of both projects.

I’m really happy that PackageKit is now in Debian too, which makes PK completely cross-distro now, which is one of the most important goals of PK.

Thanks to everyone who made this possible!

One thought on “PackageKit available in Debian!

  1. My first Linux distro was Ubuntu late last year, and it is still my main and fiovrate distro. I consider myself as a Linux newbie, a non technical person, who is a command line idiot, definitely not a power user who tweaks his OS like mad.After being introduced to Linux world by Ubuntu, I tried a few different distros such as Fedora, SuseLinux, and PCLinuxOS.Comparing to the few distros above, Ubuntu is not the easiest distro to use for a new Linux user (PCLinuxOS won in this category), nor it is pretty (would rank it last out of the box, at most a tie with Fedora), and it is definately not as cutting edge as Fedora. However, what makes Ubuntu stands out from the rest in my humble opinion is the community built around the OS.A lot of information can be found on the web ranging from fans’ blogs, community wiki, and last but not least the friendly Ubuntu forums. Many of these sites have very high quality articles who do not assume the readers to be power users and gave tremendous amount of hand holding. The Ubuntu forum is amazing, a stupid question which might attract response like RTFM on other forums will have friendly replies within minutes. This is something that really sets it apart from other distros, and makes new switchers stay.Comparing to other distros, I can find solutions from the web and forums more easily, and also the solutions are more newbie friendly. A Linux distro can be newbie friendly, and installs everything out of the box, however, without strong community support and encouragement, the desire and fire to switch from another platform will die very fast.

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