GSoC Status - The End

[Matthew Windsor]

Hi all,

The port for the PackageKit backend has now been sent for CFT (only
one response so far, and that was a doesn't work, so I'm not sure how
well the backend will survive...), is now on a relatively stable
master site, and Summer of Code is now over thus this is the final
status report from me.

I've been toying around with gnome-packagekit and successfully
installed a package with it, so I'm not sure what the problems with
that are at the moment.  Some minor UI issues (not sure on which end
the blame lies) appeared, the "this'll install these, are you sure?"
dialog wouldn't go away, but I can foresee the backend with a bit of
fixing up being useable in the foreseeable future.

Retrospectively, I think much of what I set out to do has been
accomplished, and I've produced in the worst case a sizeable base that
can be worked on to provide a consumer-usable PackageKit frontend to
pkgng now and in the future.  Quite a bit of the glue has been unit
tested, and I've tried to make a separation of "pure" functions not
touching the pkgng database or backend structure and those that do so
that testing of the former is easy.

There is however a lot of things that can be improved on the backend:
1) Implementing some of the remaining functionality, especially Cancel
for the querying and searching actions (this might be somewhat easy
and should only involve adding a break to for loops, but issues
involve trying to do this in "pure" code and doing it in jobs);
2) Bug testing (hence the CFT!);
3) Cosmetic problems, especially error reporting and status reporting;
4) Porting to PackageKit 0.8.x (I think this might need some expertise
on the PackageKit/GNOME end as to why 0.8.x seems not to work on
FreeBSD);
5) Eventually, after 4) occurs, contributing the backend to PackageKit upstream.

If nothing else, from these past few weeks I've taken away quite a few
things.  I now know how to make a basic FreeBSD port, call for
testing, and do the unspeakable- unit test C (gulp!).  It's nowhere
near as scary as I thought it would be!  I now know a lot more about
how to use PackageKit and pkgng than I did when I started, and most
important of all I know to avoid glib in future =P

Thanks to everyone who's pointed out ideas, corrections and other such
things during the past few months, and hopefully I haven't let you all
down too much...

~ Matt