Announcemnet: PyGTK PackageKit

Category: Ubuntu

Recently I added support for asynchronous operations to the Python client of PackageKit. And on top of this a set of PyGTK widgets which make using PackageKit quite comfortable. The code is part of today's 0.3.10 release.

The following widgets help to visualise the status and progress of a transaction:

* PackageKitStatusIcon
* PackageKitStatusAnimation
* PackageKitStatusLabel
* PackageKitProgressBar
* PackageKitCancelButton - allows to cancel a running transaction
* PackageKitProgressDialog - provides an all-in-one solution of the above widgets
* PackageKitMessageDialog - presents messages and errors from PackageKit

Here you can see a video of the demo application in action. As a prove of concept I replaced the call of Synaptic in gnome-app-install by PackageKit. Here is the corresponding screencast.

The following code snippet installs the package xterm with a graphical progress dialog:

from packagekit.client import PackageKitClient
from packagekit.gtkwidgets import PackageKitProgressDialog
from packagekit.enums import *

def on_exit(trans, exit, runtime):
    '''Handle exit state of a transaction e.g. erros or EULAs'''
    pass
# Initialize the client
pk = PackageKitClient()
# Get packages which provide xterm
packages = pk.Resolve(FILTER_NONE, "xterm")
# Setup the transaction to install the first package
trans = pk.InstallPackages([packages[0].id], exit_handler=on_exit)
# Initialize the dialog window
dia = PackageKitProgressDialog()
# Connect the transaction to the dialog and run it
dia.set_transaction(trans)
dia.run()

The API is not yet set into stone. So I am open for comments and feedback!

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