A software center for Fedora

Giovanni Campagna scampa.giovanni at gmail.com
Fri Nov 25 23:03:27 UTC 2011


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.

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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