Hello everyone,
After updating to F34, I was unpleasantly surprised by the new Plasma update
notifier (plasma-discover-notifier). Even though the previous plasma-pk-updates
thing had its quirks and Apper also wasn't the most featureful of package
managers, I still ran into a handful of issues with Discover that make it
pretty much useless for me:
– There seems to be no way to select which updates to install. All I can see
is a list of available updates with a button to install all of them, but no
way to pick and choose a subset. (Yes, I could use commandline DNF with a
whole bunch of "-x" arguments to get the job done, but the point of a GUI is
to make things more user friendly, isn't it?)
– I can't seem to find the description of individual package updates (the short
changelog that plasma-pk-updates shows when you click a particular package,
together with Bugzilla or Bodhi links). Again, getting these any other way
than through the GUI updater is a real hassle.
– The tray notifier doesn't let me actually do anything directly, I have to
wait for it to open a full Discover window and spend a long while loading the
updates, which is much more disruptive than the few seconds needed to trigger
updating through plasma-pk-updates.
I can see how many people nowadays might prefer the "app store" feel of
Discover to more traditional package managers, so I'm not saying Discover
shouldn't be the default. However, can't we keep plasma-pk-updates as an
alternative for those whose needs aren't covered by Discover?
Right now, one can install f34 build of plasma-pk-updates from Koji and
everything works fine, but plasma-discover-notifier comes with Obsoletes:
plasma-pk-updates < 0.5, which I find a tad aggressive (forcing replacement of
not only any current version of plasma-pk-updates, but also any versions to
come). What about changing that to only obsolete whatever the highest version
is in F33 (so that everyone still gets the new default on upgrades), but still
letting people manually install plasma-pk-updates on F34? It's not like
plasma-pk-updates has a lot of dependencies or receives many new features, so
future maintenance burden should be minimal to negligible.
Unless there's a better solution, I'll just build plasma-pk-updates on Copr
with a bumped epoch (and Conflicts: plasma-discover-notifier). That should get
the job done, but it would be nicer (and more discoverable) to keep it in the
main repos.
2T