PackageKit

PackageKit’s console client.

Documentation:

pkcon is an unprivileged client handing transactions to the packagekitd daemon over D-Bus, with the distro’s native backend (apt, dnf, zypp, alpm, …) doing the real work. Escalation is polkit’s job, so no operation is marked sudo: under a strict polkit policy, unattended mutations need a policy permitting them without interactive authentication.

Note

pkcon renders packages as a fused name-version.arch (repo) string and never exposes the raw name;version;arch;repo ID. Names and versions both legitimately contain dashes, so the name/version split below anchors on the first dash followed by a digit: a documented heuristic, not an exact science.

Platforms

  • 🐧 Linux (except Windows Subsystem for Linux v1, Windows Subsystem for Linux v2)

Operations

Operation

Supported

Notes

installed

✓

outdated

✓

search

✓

exact and extended search backfilled by mpm

install

✓

upgrade

✓

upgrade_all

✓

remove

✓

sync

✓

cleanup

Ecosystem

  • Accepted purl types: pkg:pkcon

Usage

$ mpm --pkcon installed
$ mpm --pkcon search "query"
$ mpm --pkcon upgrade --all
$ mpm install pkg:pkcon/hello
$ mpm --dry-run --pkcon upgrade --all

Every example above accepts --dry-run, which simulates the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Deselect the manager for a single run with --no-pkcon, disable it from your configuration, or tune its invocation attributes with per-manager overrides.

Command line

  • CLI names, in lookup order: pkcon

  • Arguments forced after each call: --plain

  • Environment forced on each call:

    • LC_ALL=C

The version is probed by running:

$ pkcon --version
1.3.6

and extracted with:

r"^(?P<version>[\d.]+)$"

Privilege escalation

mpm runs this manager as the current user and never prepends sudo by default. Flip the policy for its privileged operations with --sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown

State of PackageKit’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

  • Status: ➖ N/A (delegates to the distro backend)

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.

Reference traces

Raw native outputs captured in the manager source: the reference mpm’s parsers were written against. If you know PackageKit well and a transcript below looks wrong, or a newer release changed its output format, report it.

$ pkcon get-packages --filter installed --plain
Installed    gzip-1.12-1.fc38.x86_64 (koji-override-0)
Installed    hello-2.12.1-2.fc38.x86_64 (fedora)

$ pkcon get-updates --plain
Security     curl-8.0.1-2.fc38.x86_64 (updates)
Normal       hello-2.12.2-1.fc38.x86_64 (updates)