Loading pathlists and changelogs

[Anders F Björklund]

Back in September, I wrote:

> Gustavo Niemeyer wrote:
>
>>> Currently pathlist and changelog are not implemented
>>> for non-installed packages (i.e. they just return [])
>>
>> I've skimmed through your mail, but I don't see a list of
>> use cases, and what in the current mechanism isn't
>> supporting them.
>>
>> Can you please provide some more details about these?
>
> When trying to view the pathlist or changelog of a
> package that is available in a RPM-MD or APT-DEB
> repository, but not currently installed on the system,
> the list of files or changelog entries is "blank".
>
> The discussion is about providing a way to load the
> information from the repository, without installing.
> So you would click the Content/Changelog tabs, it
> would fetch the data, and then show it to you... ?

Here's another usage scenario for non-installed packages:
http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2009/03/05/application-installing/

The Smart backend for PackageKit (with an updated Smart)
allows for running with "ScanDesktopFiles=true" (installed).
It does not, however, support "pk-app-install-generate"
since that would query/download the uninstalled packages.

Of course, for this application one *could* download the
package first and get the filelist second instead. Still...

--anders