Running this Python code displays a confirmation dialog ("Install packages in catalogue?"), despite passing "never" to the DBus method. I expected the method to not show any dialogs, except perhaps an authorisation dialog. import dbus bus = dbus.SessionBus() proxy = bus.get_object("org.freedesktop.PackageKit", "/org/freedesktop/PackageKit") iface = dbus.Interface(proxy, "org.freedesktop.PackageKit.Modify") iface.InstallCatalogs(dbus.UInt32(0), [catalog_file], "never") I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 with these packages, installed through Ubuntu's repositories: packagekit: 0.5.7-0ubuntu2 packagekit-gnome: 2.29.2-0ubuntu1 I have created an appropriate .service file in /usr/share/dbus-1/services for org.freedesktop.PackageKit to avoid this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/packagekit-gnome/+bug/617866 For discussion on why I might need this method to work correctly, see this mailing list thread: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/packagekit/2010-August/005822.html
Why did you expect "never" to work? Usually you suppress dialogs with "hide-query", "hide-finished" etc. See http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-packagekit/plain/docs/DBusInterface.txt for the API.
See lines 156-158 of http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-packagekit/plain/src/org.freedesktop.PackageKit.xml Convenience options such as: <doc:tt>never</doc:tt>, <doc:tt>defaults</doc:tt> or <doc:tt>always</doc:tt>. are also available.
My mistake, apologies. I'll look at this tonight.
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