/*Richard Hughes <hughsient(a)gmail.com>*/ wrote on Fri, 2 Jan 2015
13:48:51 +0000:
On 2 January 2015 at 11:45, Hedayat Vatankhah
<hedayat.fwd(a)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.