Re: Integration with gnome-software

[Peter Volpe <pvolpe redhat com>]

Hi, I'm hardly the expert, so Colin feel free to correct me where i am 
wrong.

On 03/24/2016 02:39 PM, Richard Hughes wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm building a plugin for gnome-software so we can do system upgrades
> of an atomic workstation for Fedora 25 (using rpm-ostree). GNOME
> Software (and the desktop generally) has some quite different
> requirements compared to the cloud image and so I wanted to ask for
> help before I jumped right in.
>
> I'd appreciate some advice on how to do the following:
>
> * List the user-visible name for the remote, i.e. something like
> "Fedora Workstation" rather than just the ID from
> ostree_repo_remote_list(). If this isn't available anywhere we can
> just hardcode something (e.g. fedora-atomic-workstation -> _("Fedora
> Workstation")) but I know xdg-app has something like this in the
> summary file.

This concept isn't consistently implemented yet.

> * Get the *default* remote for the system (this is just the first in
> the list, right?)

The default remote is based on the current default deployment. If you 
are using rpm-ostree dbus it's in the Deployment tuple.

> * Get the packages installed that make up the currently running system
> (e.g. kernel-1.2.3, glibc-1.3.2, gnome-shell-3.20.0) -- using rpm
> would be fine of course, but wouldn't be an awesome dep and it would
> be much more awesome to just query a daemon or read a file.

AFAIK, you can use the rpm-ostree library to get this. 
https://github.com/projectatomic/rpm-ostree/tree/master/src/lib but that 
also has the rpm dependencies.


> * Download all the required commits for the newest version of a
> specific remote *without* actually committing (so we can download when
> the session is idle) -- also with progress and cancellability (we
> auto-cancel the background download if the session goes non-idle).

AFAIK, the rpm-ostree dbus api does not currently support this, but can 
be done using the ostree library directly. The dbus api only supports 
downloading the rpm directory so that you can preview what changes will 
be made. But it doesn't download the whole file tree.

> * Display all the package names of all the updates in the
> downloaded-but-not-staged commits (so we can ask the user to show the
> update info in the UI) - hiding anything that's not been downloaded.

This can be done with the DownloadDeployRpmDiff / GetCachedDeployRpmDiff 
and DownloadUpdateRpmDiff / GetCachedUpdateRpmDiff dbus methods.

> * Rebase *without* actually rebooting automatically (note: we'd need
> progress notifications and cancellability if this is going to take
> more than a couple of seconds)

If using the dbus api, all the deploy methods only reboot if passed the 
reboot option.

> gnome-software isn't running privileged, and so any root-requiring
> actions would need to go through rpm-ostreed. Any help welcome,
> thanks.
>
> Richard
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