Richard Hughes <hughsient@gmail.com> wrote on Fri, 2 Jan 2015 13:48:51 +0000:
On 2 January 2015 at 11:45, Hedayat Vatankhah <hedayat.fwd@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, I know. And I say that it might be OK for a "GNOME Application", but
doesn't seem to be OK for Fedora application.
There's no such thing as a "Fedora application".
Maybe it should! :P



It seems that many command line utilities in Security spin can be considered
applications since security spin provides .desktop files and icons for many
of them!
No, we ignore any with the ConsoleOnly hint.
Thanks!!


Wikipedia has a page about it, one of the application types you can create
in Qt Creator is "Qt Console Application", Microsoft Visual Studio also
provides a "Console Application" type. Yes, none of these are authoritative,
but I wonder if there is any reference backing your claim.
Okay, lets do a thought experiment. Is a console application anything
that exists in /usr/bin? If not, what additional rules are required
for a "sane" set? Are all files in /usr/bin "applications"?
Probably no. Good examples for things which are probably not considered applications by users can be 'utilities' such as 'test', 'ls', and the like. However, I'm not sure if I can come up with a set of strict rules. Maybe it can be up to the packager? However, I think any binary which is useful on its own can be considered a good candidate for being an 'application' to be presented in a software center application. Conceptually, I see no difference between a GUI web browser and a TUI one. Both of them can have windows in which you can see web pages. TUI can have menus, buttons and whatever you can find in a GUI. I think I can say that every software with a UI(Text based/curses based), which can be easily (conceptually, not technically) replaced with a GUI, is certainly an application.

But I wont limit it here. I think that compilers also should be considered applications. While your idea of installing them as part of an IDE's addons work, it can be problematic unless add-ons can be shared between multiple packages. If not, every IDE which supports different compilers should have addons for each one of them (so every C/C++ IDE would need an addon for GCC, and another one for Clang). If addons can be shared among multiple applications, then things will be slightly better. So, there will be one GCC addon, and one Clang addon, which multiple IDEs might present. But personally, I'd prefer to be able to install GCC/clang when searching for "C++ compiler" in a software center application.

Apart from the "Application" discussion, I really like to see a new "Development Libraries" concept in Gnome software just like Fonts and Input sources, which lets a developer to look for libraries and rate them. Some of them can even have screenshots: GUI libraries (Qt, GTK) and graphic/game engines are good examples.

Thanks



Richard.