Project Description

During the last 3 years working on zypper we constantly reiterated the idea to refactor zypper to get rid of a lot of cruft that has collected over the years ,but just recently I realized that we maybe should go one step further.

Meet velcro, a new frontend and backend server implemented in Rust that is completly agnostic to the way how software is installed and maintained on a system. It is utilizing backends that implement the specific application management behavior controlled over a generic, programming language agnostic protocol, to support backends in various languages.

The Velcro protocol will support a lot of different features in a generic way but its important that the backends can decide which one of those they want to support. The zypp backend will for example support something like patches, the flatpak backend however does not. The frontend needs to tell the user which featues are avaible.

The following concepts should be available in velcro:

Repository management: add , remove, modify, refresh package/application sources
Application management: add, remove applications/packages
Update: update all packages on the system,
Query: search for existing applications or packages

This is not another packagekit, we explicitely do not want to use D-Bus as a protocol language, this works only on full blown Linux installations and is not what we are looking for. We need a simple lightweight way of having backends using standard Linux facilities with minimal dependencies.

Goal for this Hackweek

Currently this is only a idea, but we should get all the details on how to communicate between the different velcro building blocks together and decide which IPC protocol is used. And hopefully start hacking on the prototype.

Resources

Documentation of initial idea