PackageKit

jpr noted on his blog that I’ve been interesting in integrating PackageKit into the distribution. This is one of my many goals for making openSUSE a better operating system than it already is.

Currently, I’m waiting for PolicyKit 0.5 and dbus 1.1.2 to get into the distribution. After that, we can write a zypp backend, test it, and send it upstream to PackageKit, since they want backends to be part of PackageKit themselves. Our various updaters can be replaced by PackageKit frontends, and Benji’s One-Click Install can be simplified since it can use PackageKit to set up the repositories and install the packages, instead of a nasty hack of calling another yast module via a longish command.

Policy Editor Module Help

I’m currently working on the policy-editor module for YaST (to edit
PolicyKit configuration), and I want some input on some of the design
decisions:

1. I’m using python code for the loading and parsing of the policy
description files (its XML, and DOM makes parsing XML a dream). The
policy description files describes the actions, provides a
(translateable) description, and sane defaults.

That part I’m fine with, since I can use YCP to interact with and load
the model from the python code.

2. The actual policies as defined by the system administrator is located
in /etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf

Now my question is, how should I go about generating this file? Should
we use this file directly, or use sysconfig to generate the file
dynamically, and potentially provide for a “local include” so that you
can include custom policies not set via YaST?

OpenSUSE 10.3 Package : mugshot

I added mugshot to my OBS repo: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jhaygood/openSUSE_10.3/

For more information on mugshot: http://www.mugshot.org

Any other cool packages I should add?

Another reason the iPod (and its creator!) sucks

While I like some of Apple’s engineering’s efforts (webkit.org mostly), some of their other creations suck.

The new Apple iPod Touch was released the other day. Apple apparently changed the database format of the on device media library to require some secret cryptography so that it only works with Apple iTunes, preventing other players (such as Banshee) from properly working with the iPod. I don’t personally own an iPod for many reasons, and this is just another reason to boycott the Apple iPod.

openSUSE

Best operating system ever.