It works: Plasma now looks up missing components through PackageKit!

Sorry, I haven’t blogged for a while, but rest assured that I’m still alive and coding. 🙂 I passed the midterm evaluation, and the final evaluation is approaching. So what do we have in the store?

• My patches to PackageKit, Apper and gnome-packagekit got pushed upstream. The changes to the PackageKit core even trickled down all the way to Fedora 15 (and of course Fedora 16 and Rawhide). I have backported the Apper changes to the Rawhide kpackagekit package.
• I added support for Plasma to automatically prompt for the installation of missing script and data engines the first time something attempts to use them. This patch got pushed upstream.
• I submitted another patch for review, which makes Plasma request the installation of required script engines (always, as this is covered by existing metadata) and data engines (if specified in the metadata through a new X-Plasma-RequiredDataEngines entry) as soon as a package (usually a widget) is installed through Open Collaboration Services (OCS), rather than only when the user attempts to add the widget to some containment (desktop, panel etc.). This patch is pending upstream feedback.
• I also wrote an RPM auto-Requires script based on the same metadata as the above patch. This ensures script and data engine dependencies will be automatically detected in future Fedora packages.

Now the only remaining work item on my project plan is automatic scanning for required data engines. (Script engines are already completely handled by the above patches.)