Add apk backend support to PackageKit

Created by: PureTryOut

Off-topic: Maybe we should have a different repo for issues unrelated to pmbootstrap itself...

We should get apk support into PackageKit. PackageKit is used in combination with some other programs to offer a user-friendly front-end to package managers. An example of this is Plasma's "Discover": a software centre installed by default on the reference Plasma Mobile image which is creating a mobile layout. It would be awesome if we could use applications like these as the graphical way to install applications onto a postmarketOS system.

Some information to get somebody started.

Created by: ollieparanoid

Good idea!

CC @awilfox from Alpine based Adélie Linux in case there is any interest in the Adélie community for this. Discover is available for the desktop as well.

By * postmarketOS Bot on 2018-04-15T18:58:53

PackageKit has been on our list for (literal) years. Haven't had time to actually mock it up.

This is actually a release blocker for Adélie 2.0, but that's two years away.

It'd be nice if I knew if libapk was actually going to be significantly overhauled (as hinted at by others in the Alpine community before), before I actually committed to writing such an interface. This interface would be quite dependent on the libapk ABI.

By A. Wilcox on 2018-04-16T00:26:36

mentioned in issue wiki#19 (closed)

By Oliver Smith on 2018-12-11T08:03:47

added discussion help wanted labels

CC @Cogitri

By Bart Ribbers on 2019-12-19T15:33:05

I haven't given it that deep of a look since I don't want to work on a C codebase (apk). However, it'd be easiest to use packagekit-glib for implementing this which probably isn't a dep we want to get into apk anyway, so maybe having some external addon-lib is the way to go over this anyway. I wouldn't mind writing that in D or Rust, but the former doesn't have support for platforms other than x86_64 in 3.11.

By Rasmus Thomsen on 2019-12-19T16:05:16

So, now that I'm done with exams I had time to give this a deeper look, seems like my previous answer was pretty uninformed.

PackageKit upstream told me that PackageKit is pretty dead and recommended writing frontend specific plugins (so e.g. one plugin for gnome-software like https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/blob/master/plugins/) and KDE's thingie. That doesn't really seem optimal to me since that'll most likely mean we'll only support a few frontends, but oh well. I'll look into making a GNOME Software plugin next week :)

By Rasmus Thomsen on 2020-01-21T14:11:37

I've (almost) completed writing https://gitlab.com/minlexx/libapk-qt and very early WIP on plasma-discover backend

By Alexey Min on 2020-01-21T14:19:57

Ah neat, I'll look into making something similiar GLib based.

By Rasmus Thomsen on 2020-01-21T14:39:16

mentioned in issue #506 (closed)

By Oliver Smith on 2020-03-22T02:37:25

PackageKit upstream told me that PackageKit is pretty dead and recommended writing frontend specific plugins (so e.g. one plugin for gnome-software like https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/blob/master/plugins/) and KDE's thingie.

Thanks, closing this issue in favor of #506 (closed) and #507 (closed) then.

By Oliver Smith on 2024-02-21T01:11:25

closed

By Oliver Smith on 2020-03-22T02:40:36

mentioned in merge request !2212 (merged)

By Pablo Correa Gomez on 2021-07-18T19:01:06

mentioned in issue #2198 (closed)

By Daniel Fancsali on 2023-12-13T20:25:12

mentioned in issue #2477 (closed)

By mrintrepide on 2023-12-26T23:22:14

mentioned in merge request !6106