Bug 366826

Summary: Adding sources in discover cannot possibly work
Product: [Applications] Discover Reporter: Harald Sitter <sitter>
Component: discoverAssignee: Aleix Pol <aleixpol>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED    
Severity: major Flags: aleixpol: Usability+
Priority: NOR    
Version First Reported In: 5.7.2   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Other   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Harald Sitter 2016-08-16 10:42:37 UTC 
The sources view has an add button but packagekit documentation says the following:
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/pk-faq.html#repo-add-remove
I also couldn't find any API that can add sources.

Which raises the question of how a person is meant to add repos. I guess this should be brought to the attention of the VDG as well.

Reproducible: Always
Comment 1 Aleix Pol 2016-08-23 12:39:22 UTC 
Harald, I guess. Or well, how would you like this to work? Do you think having repositories as deb files as suggested there would work?
Comment 2 Harald Sitter 2016-08-23 12:58:50 UTC 
It's not really common for debs, but, generally it's possible (and done by spotify, chrome other proprietary stuff). You install a deb and it injects its relevant update repo into the system sources.

The problem with it is that you first have to have a deb to bootstrap the repo into your settings. But there is no deb for that random launchpad PPA you'd like to add, so for 90% of the use case it's a non-solution on account of not existing :/

Which is why I think this ought to be considered from a design perspective.
We could absolutely take the same stance as packagekit and say that sources cannot be add or edit via Discover and we expect users to use a distro CLI tool or whatever if they want to add a foreign repo (which incidentally is what most people do with PPAs specifically anyway). 
OR we consider this wanted functionality under the powerful-when-needed mantra, in which case I think we need to manually craft support for edit/add (i.e. introduce some add-on plugin interface through which distros can implement this functionality for their respective package management system).
Comment 3 Aleix Pol 2016-08-23 13:35:16 UTC 
Makes sense. I'm tempted to say that if somebody wants to have weird versions of stuff, he could either add it himself with the text editor or use bundles (i.e. flatpak, snappy, appimage).
Would that make sense? Or there's a clear usecase for adding apt repositories?
Comment 4 Aleix Pol 2016-11-29 14:35:07 UTC 
Integrated software-properties-kde in the PackageKitBackend (provided it's available) to be able to juggle repositories.