What starts packagekitd?

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1

This surprised me:


# zypper lu
PackageKit is blocking zypper. This happens if you have an updater applet or other software management application using PackageKit running.
Tell PackageKit to quit? [yes/no] (no):
System management is locked by the application with pid 6990 (/usr/lib/packagekitd).
Close this application before trying again.

A few seconds later, when I checked. process 6990 did not exist and packagekitd was not running.

I’m using Plasma 5 on 42.1. The updater applet is disabled (system tray settings).

So what started packagekitd?

2

It looks if it might be periodically started by cron.

3

Hi
Only if configured to?


cat /etc/sysconfig/packagekit-background|grep ENABLED
4 
ENABLED=no

I guess that’s not it. Something else must be periodically starting it.

5

It happened again.

This time I at least saw the process:


ps -fp 13486
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
root     13486     1 51 23:09 ?        00:00:14 /usr/lib/packagekitd

By 23:10, it had stopped.

6

It now looks as if “zypper” is starting “packagekitd”

This has now happened three times:

(1) I run “zypper lp” to list which patches are ready to be installed.
(2) I run “zypper lu” to list which updates are available (that also picks up packman updates).

The last three times, step (2) was initially blocked by packagekitd, though if I wait a short while I can then retry.

If I immediately repeat, this doesn’t happen. But if I wait long enough before I repeat, then it looks as if it will happen again. I’m guessing that this was a change with the latest zypper/libzypp update. Probably when zypper discovers that a refresh is needed, it starts packagekitd so that it will also refresh.

7

I think I once installed Leap 42.1 without Packagekit (as I always do). It wasn’t a dependency on e.g. zypper (or anything else).