Bug 547764

Summary:	Updater-applet does not show up when checking for updates using packagekit/using packagekit in any way
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 11.2	Reporter:	Atri Bhattacharya <badshah400>
Component:	GNOME	Assignee:	E-mail List <gnome-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Major
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	lmedinas, vuntz
Version:	RC 1
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	x86-64
OS:	Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Atri Bhattacharya 2009-10-16 21:09:05 UTC

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090909 SUSE/3.5.3-3.2 Firefox/3.5.3

Checking for updates from application-browser -> software update viewer. But the applet in the system-tray does not show up while the checking is in progress. This used to work correctly in 11.0. In fact I do not see any updater-applet or similar app in 11.2 rc1.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Start software update viewer.
2.See if there is an applet in system-tray.
3.
Actual Results:  
No applet is seen

Expected Results:  
Some applet indicating package-kit is busy should be showing up in the system-tray/notification area.

Unfortunately messages like "software management is locked by packagekitd" is fairly common, but there is nothing that indicates to the user that packagekit is working. Some applet should be present like in 11.1

Comment 1 Sanford Armstrong 2009-10-16 22:00:10 UTC

Yes, this is extremely frustrating...it seems that whenever I want to use yast or zypper I get the error that packagekitd is locking the package db, but I have no visual indicator that anything is going on, and no idea of how I can safely stop it (without reading wiki pages or asking in irc...which we can assume most users will never do).

Even with a notification area icon, there is not enough good communication with the user happening here, but maybe improving that should be a different bug.

Comment 2 Vincent Untz 2009-10-19 08:29:39 UTC

I would guess (I'm not sure) that the icon is not visible in this case because it was considered as abusing your notification area. So that wouldn't really be a bug.

The real issue is that packagekit locks your zypper db, and I don't think having an icon to tell you that is that useful :/

Comment 3 Atri Bhattacharya 2009-10-19 23:14:16 UTC

(In reply to comment #2)
The icon is not visible when packagekit is not working and that is good. However when packagekit is checking for updates, working in any other way, there used to be a visible icon in 11.1 (as far as I remember) indicating that the software stack was working. This is not there in 11.2. The icon still shows up when it detects an update, though, as it should. I don't mind (hopefully most others don't either) my notification area being misused for a few seconds, if it gives me an useful visual indicator that the software management stack is being used :) .

Comment 4 Atri Bhattacharya 2010-04-06 10:19:17 UTC

Can something be done about showing the packagekit "working" icon during times when packagekit is checking for updates for 11.3? At the moment there is no visual indication the packagekit is working, just suddenly a signal that there are updates. The process is too silent in my opinion. It is okay to not have a permanent icon for packagekit and abuse the notification area, but while packagekit is working (checking for updates, installing something), it would be nice to have an icon appear there that tells me that I cannot use zypper now as the software management stack is already in use. Please consider this for 11.3.

Comment 5 Vincent Untz 2010-04-08 12:15:04 UTC

So I filed a bugs to fix zypper and yast to tell PackageKit to quit. It's already implemented in zypper, and for yast, this is https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=580513

So I'm going to close as duplicate of this last one.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 580513 ***