On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 5:46 PM, seth vidal <skvidal(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
I mentioned this on:
http://skvidal.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/fedora-app-market-proof-of-concept/
last night but I thought I'd bring it up here:
Yesterday someone was talking about installing apps in fedora and how it
was hard to figure out what to install/try b/c there were too much STUFF
in fedora. They suggested an ‘app store’ like functionality. I explained
that all the resources to do something like that exist in the
infrastructure yum and friends offer now. I decided to prove that
concept a bit.
The concept of an ‘app’ is pretty amorphous but I decided to just use
what Colin Walters said was his definition of an ‘app’ – which is any
pkg containing a .desktop file. So I just whipped up a simple tool to
dump out an xml-file of a format yum is already familiar with based on
that criteria:
http://skvidal.fedorapeople.org/misc/appfinder.py
Running that generates an xml file with only the ‘apps’ defined.
Great. Then I wrote a yum plugin to access and use this data.
and I stuck it in this repo
1. copy this file into /etc/yum.repos.d/
2. run: yum install yum-plugin-appmarket
Now yum will have a few new commands available to it:
app-install Install an App
app-list List Apps
app-remove Remove an App
app-search Search for an App
Some examples:
yum app-search yum
won’t turn up ‘yum’ but it will turn up ‘yumex’.
Fancy, huh?
Now, the concept of an app can be refined in many ways but this is just
to prove that the infrastructure has been available.
Thanks for working on this, the concept of "packages" should be an
implementation detail that much (desktop) users shouldn't have to care
about.
This is definitely a step in the right direction. PK should follow
that and only display apps by default in the GUI.