From: "Giovanni Campagna"
<scampa.giovanni(a)gmail.com>
To: devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
Sent: Saturday, November 26, 2011 1:03:27 AM
Subject: A software center for Fedora
As promised in my previous mail, here is what I find that's lacking
in
Fedora, compared to the direct competition (Ubuntu, Debian,
OpenSuse),
and recently even some proprietary systems: we don't have an
application
installer.
While we do have two nice UIs (gpk-application and apper) for package
management, having to deal with packages, with no icons and no
translations is not appropriate for end users. Instead, I think it
would
be appriopriate to follow the Ubuntu path and recognize the
applications
from .desktop files, because that is what will end up in the app
launcher.
Since this is free software, we already have a complete software
center
available, straight from
launchpad.net/software-center.
(Actually, it doesn't yet work on Fedora, partly because of unmet
dependencies, but those are just technical bugs, and I don't think it
would be difficult to have something running soon)
What is missing, though, is the data, representing the applications
available in fedora repositories.
Long long ago (march 2009), a package was proposed for inclusion,
which
contained application data, in a format understood by
software-center,
for fedora at that time. This package was initially rejected, then
one
year later FESCo ruled that it did not actually break packaging
guidelines, yet it disappeared.
Back to present, it's almost 2012. I'm here and I want to do whatever
is
required, at all layers, to ensure that application data is correctly
generated, updated, and downloaded, at all times and for all users.
This
may involve changes in our repository infrastructure, in yum,
packagekit
and maybe in other places as well.
IIRC and think about the same package - this was a package containing data that is part of
repos metadata,
without any idea how it would be for kept uptodate with latest packages. From time to time
updates is not an option obviously.
You have a noble goal to improve user experience but please whatever you do, don't do
anything that will require every packager
to do something - it won't work and I'm pretty sure that many maintainers would
happily give you commit rights to their packages
but nothing more (I'm surely one of them).
This shouldn't be discouraging you - history has proven that once you have something
cool people will happily work on it.
For the missing icons for non installed software - having something like the filelist db
in the repo containing only the icons from
.desktop files might work though the size of it might be a concern. But if you do that on
the repos side I'm pretty sure that adding
support for it to gpk/apper would be an easy task.
Regards,
Alex
I think this is specifically a Fedora feature, as it involves the
whole
distribution and touches many groups at the same time, which explains
why I proposed it here instead of anywhere else. If you think it's
worth
it, I'd like to propose it as an official Fedora 17 Feature, and I'll
happily write the wiki page.
I hope that some people from the relevant group will point me to the
right place (perhaps starting from what happened to
fedora-app-install...), and I hope you like the idea in general.
Giovanni
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