software-center doesn't Provide apturl, or replace it in the seed

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

Ubuntu Software Center 2.1.17.2, Ubuntu Maverick daily 20100910

1. Install Ubuntu Maverick from scratch.
2. In Firefox, follow this link. <http://apt.ubuntu.com/p/python-wxtools>
3. Navigate to the "Installed Software" section, and search for "apturl".

What happens:
2. Ubuntu Software Center launches to the screen for PyShell.
3. Both apturl and apturl-common are installed.

What should happen:
2. Ubuntu Software Center launches to the screen for PyShell.
3. apturl should not be installed (and possibly apturl-common shouldn't be either).

<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter#apturl>: "When this feature is fully implemented, the software-center package should be marked as Provides: apturl and Replaces: apturl." (If this is not the appropriate metadata, let me know and I'll update the spec.)

[Kiwinote (kiwinote)]

This is because ubufox still has hard-coded calls to the apturl package in its plugin finder code. Replacing it with a s-c call if s-c is installed is not entirely trivial as a few assumptions are made about the process. Ideally it would be nice to see ubufox calling s-c with a mimetype which needs to be installed, and then ubufox not caring about a return value (ie was it installed or not). In addition to that then s-c should show a dialog or whatever requesting to restart firefox once one of these pkgs has been installed. This is just one of the ways we could deal with this though, and is just a quick thought. Ie something to think about for natty. Ideally we replace gnome-codec-install with the same sort of a process. Perhaps there are other use cases when other apps do and should care about the return value.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Sorry if this is a silly question, but why doesn't ubufox use aptdaemon directly?

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

There is currently no way for software center to signal to the plugin-installer that package installation has finished, and this is necessary so that Firefox can reload it's plugins. Without that, the user will need to restart Firefox once they know that software-center has finished installing.

apturl does this by just exitting once it's done, and this is easy to pick up in ubufox. We can't do that with software-center...

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Oh, sorry, I missed the bit about using aptdaemon directly.

Yeah, we could possibly do that for Natty, but it's pretty difficult when there is no access to native dbus libraries from Javascript code. We'd need to either write another helper to replace apturl (which seems completely pointless, we already have apturl as a helper to do this for us), write a binary XPCOM component to allow us to access to dbus, or make use of jsctypes.

Anyway, whichever solution we pick is not a 5 minute job we can do for maverick unfortunately

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Bug 533058 is related for gnome-codec-install.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

And bug 621031 for gdebi.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

I'll integrate the plugin finder with the packagekit interface next cycle, and make use of sessioninstaller

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

This is basically done now

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

ubufox no longer depends on apturl, but is using aptdaemon directly

[Gary Lasker (gary-lasker)]

Based on Chris' comments #8 and #9, it appears this bug is fixed. I'll set the software-center tasks accordingly.

Many thanks!