It looks like actually doing the install involves running dpkg. This gets a little tricky with an X app, especially if it was run from a wm menu or the like and not from an xterm.
Anyway, so question 1 is, this is how it works, right? Question two is: to handle this in gnome-apt, I propose to use the Gnome terminal widget. The terminal widget can come up in an application-modal window, and things will be kind of lame but not horrible. However, the terminal widget has an interface like this: pid = zvt_term_forkpty(term_widget); i.e., I need to do the fork myself so that the child gets connected to the widget and not the original stdin/stdout. So: could pkgDPkgPM perhaps have a function: virtual pid_t fork() with semantics identical to the usual fork(), which I can replace with this terminal-widget-fork thing? Question three: I only see how to do "Complete run" from the Actions menu described in the UI design. Are the menu items to only install, remove, or upgrade implemented in apt-pkg? I have Update and Install working now I think, but you have to run from an xterm so you can interact with dpkg, and gnome-apt doesn't sanity check when you mark packages so it's possible to get yourself in a state where it won't work. If I can get up the guts, I might run it as root and see what happens if dpkg doesn't die with "you're not root." But, you can definitely download the packages and package files, and I have all kinds of crazy progress meters. I'm almost done with a cheesy text search, and Lalo is hard at work on the information panes; we could have a useful program in a matter of days. Havoc
