PKCON(1)                                                              PKCON(1)

NAME
       pkcon - PackageKit console client

SYNOPSIS
       pkcon [ search ] [ debug install ] [ remove ]

DESCRIPTION
       This manual page documents briefly the pkcon command.

       pkcon is the command line client for PackageKit.

SEE ALSO
       pkmon (1).

       The programs are documented fully on http://www.packagekit.org.

AUTHOR
       This manual page was written by Richard Hughes .

                                  22 May 2008                         PKCON(1)

Man pages are for when a user is offline and does not have access to the internets. Telling them to refer to the internets to know how to use pkcon to administer their system is useless.

I’m starting to agree with jwz about my frustration with linux: “Your mission critical business platform is my summer project” does not make for a stable operating system.

Update: I spent some time in #packagekit on freenode. The general opinion I got from one of the dev team members was that:

• Packagekit shouldn’t need documentation because it should be so easy to use that there’s no question about what to do with it.
• Installing i386 arch packages along side of x86_64 bit packages is an “Advanced” feature that sysadmins should do and should not be doable from the gui or the pkcon command line tool. (Even though the GUI will currently allow you to TRY to install an i386 pacakge on an x86_64 machine, but will tell you that it’s already installed and fail with no other explanation. Especially because there’s no documentation.) One patently userland application that still requires i386 pacakges: Flash plugin for Firefox.
• Documentation is a userland activity that programmers shouldn’t be responsible for. They’re spending most of their free coding time working on the project.
• The search and filtering options completely suck ass, but we have pretty shiny icons!
• Where else are you going to test software besides the real world? Um, that’s what ‘rawhide’ is for. If your target is nontechnical users, please make sure that it’s at least usable for technical people and for people who work along with nontechnical users and know what their needs are first.

Just unreal. So there we have it, folks: PacakgeKit sucks. Thankfully, there are no plans to remove yum from Fedora that I know of… but I feel bad for any users that are stuck using this pile of crap. It’s ridiculous that the Fedora core team has allowed this turd into the main release.