Release 2 versions of Karmic with AppCenter and Packagekit default for each.

[Jean.c.h]

I would like to request 2 versions of Ubuntu Karmic(Gnome) 9.10 be released. One having AppCenter as default and the other with Packagekit installed by default.

Packagekit has been marked in development for over a year now on Brainstorm. It has received wide support on Ubuntu Brainstorm as well as throughout Ubuntu Forum community.

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/64/

It was planned to be default in Intrepid, then we were told Jaunty, then Karmic, then we get the horrible news after all this time anxiously waiting that its being comletely dropped in favour of something Canonical/Ubuntu would like to go at alone.

Way to improve standardisation in Linux. Especially in a department as important as Package Management which could really use the focus.

This is a C/P by Gnomeuser in the Forums which i think nicely sums up the importance of PK.

"PackageKit carries with it the promise of stronger integration, it gives us more granulated control over who can do what with package management. It gives application developers a toolset to have things installed on demand.

If Ubuntu, one of the biggest distributions, after first signing on to that future, sudden dumps it for their own creation we are no further. The risks here are two fold, either Ubuntu gets sidelined and will ship without the features upstreams attach to integrate PackageKit or due to Ubuntu' decision not to support PackageKit upstreams will not integrate PackageKit out of fear that a large segment won't benefit and nobody will get a universal interface for managing software - an improvement which I suspect everyone can agree is a major advantage for Linux as a whole.

Instead of fixing dpkg to not do stupid things like stopping in the middle of a transaction to ask pointless questions (e.g. glibc is a wonderful example [x] want to upgrade libc? You call yourself debhelper? I just told you do to that earlier). This isn't just a good idea to improve to fit better with PackageKit, it's a good idea in general as asking questions during a transaction is problematic at any rate, if need be asking them before a transaction is an option.

Instead they elect to use that problematic design which is fixable and will improve Ubuntu as a whole as the excuse for continuing fragmenting Linux in an area where we desperately need some standardization and rejecting an otherwise perfectly reasonable solution to a major problem.

Now they don't even give us a reasonable choice of installing PK ourselves as the repos contain a miserably old, unmaintained version, even in Karmic. This is just shining an even poorer light on PK to favor their own horrid all in one solution.

mpt might say I string people along, but he would be wrong, I did not initially label PackageKit as being in progress, I do not have a dictator of life chanting upstream upstream - and no PK is not just limited to Fedora just because it has it's origins there (no more than HAL, DeviceKit and many other things Ubuntu happily ships), it's true upstream: Pardus, Foresight, Fedora, Moblin, openSUSE (and probably more I don't have a full list in my head) all install and use packagekit by default to varying degrees. Gentoo is getting PackageKit support for Portage thanks to Google's Summer of Code this year. The list of supports grows every day and for good reasons. Even GNOME is reportedly considering some level of adoption of PackageKit in the future.

PackageKit is a widely accepted project that solves existing problems and gives us exciting new ways of using package management. Discarding it is damaging to Ubuntu and to Linux and does not fix actual problems in the status quo."

Honestly i think this is just another way to sidestep Upstream.

So at least give those of us that support PK and that have been looking forward to it for a looong time and have been testing Alpha's anxiously waiting for the day it was included, the option to still have it and its benefits and the various other projects that will benefit from it.

[Eric Appleman (erappleman)]

I second this sentiment.

It's highly likely that AppCenter won't make the cut for Karmic anyway.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Eric, if you have any actual evidence for that, please let me know what it is so I can act to avoid the problem. Thanks.

[Eric Appleman (erappleman)]

I don't have any evidence, I had meant for it to be my witty opinion. Since almost everything originally promised for Karmic has been dropped, I thought AppCenter wouldn't make it either.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

I'm not aware of anything ever being "promised for Karmic". See <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TimeBasedReleases> for more details.

[Jean.c.h (slug71)]

Well Matthew i think he means that during the Jaunty dev cycle a lot was put off for Karmic which has now been dropped. ie. Packagekit, Plymouth, Login Experience/Facebrowser, Flawless Pulseaudio, etc ....