Re: The new gnome-software update with "third party repositories" support

[Ankur Sinha]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 10:47:37 +0100, Kalev Lember wrote:
>  Hi, 
Hello,

>  
>  Thanks for starting the discussion, Ankur! I was just about to send a
>  request for testing to the test list. 
Ah - sorry. I was slightly overzealous here XD

<snip>
>  
>  More replies in-line down below:
>  
>  On 03/18/2018 01:28 PM, Ankur Sinha wrote:
>  > - Clicking "enable" should tell the user what repositories were made
>  >   available for activation. Open up the "software sources" dialogue
>  >   straight-away, maybe?
>  
>  Good point. I'll talk to aday (gnome-software designer) and discuss
>  this. We were polishing the new software repositories dialog a lot, but
>  the notification that appears on the overview page didn't get that much
>  love. I'll see what we can do; maybe just disable the notification for now. 
Thank you!

Would it also be possible to use a different term than "Third
party repositories" in the software repositories dialogue? What's
happening now is that the repositories from the
fedora-workstation-repositories package come under "Third party
repositories" accompanied by the notice on how some of these may be
proprietary, and other third party repositories that users may have
enabled themselves, such as Adobe/Dropbox/RPMFusion are coming up
in a separate section. This isn't quite intuitive---it almost gives one
the feeling that the latter are not "third party".

>  
>  > - The "find out more" link goes to the wikipedia page on properietary
>  >   software, which is frankly useless. The Fedora Forbidden items would
>  >   be a better page[2]. I would think the Forbidden Items page should
>  >   require a section explaining what Gnome-software is doing here. The
>  >   ideal scenario would be a special page that describes the individual
>  >   repositories that are included in the fedora-workstation-repositories
>  >   package. It should be a page that clearly speaks about free-software,
>  >   and Fedora's commitment to it.  I.e., it must educate users about the
>  >   matter, and say "if you must use software that is not free/open
>  >   source, you can do so here."
>  
>  Yes, we are supposed to get a new docs page for this. I'll talk to
>  mattdm and see how far we are with this. I'll make sure we update the
>  link before pushing it out to stable. 
I see this is up at the moment. It isn't updated, though (A ticket has
been filed for Nvidia repositories etc already but I didn't want to update
the page myself because I'm not completely sure of the complete process
at the moment)

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Third_party_software_list


I would really like whatever page we link to to have a clear, end-user
targeted summary of free software and our commitment to it right at the
top, and then possibly a rationale as to why we're making it easy for
users to install some very commonly used proprietary software to improve
usability.

I think this is an excellent opportunity to explain to end-users the
importance of free-software, and let them make an informed decision on
whether they want to use this set of proprietary software even if we're
giving them easy access to it.

(I do expect some will query why all of RPMFusion cannot be included, so
maybe that will need to be addressed in short too.)

>  
>  > - And of course, can RPMFusion repositories be included here too if
>  >   we're happy to include Google's software?
>  
>  Please open a ticket on https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation -- I don't
>  know the exact process how to add new repos, but I believe opening a
>  ticket there would be a start. 
Yeh. I'm following the discussion on the Nvidia ticket now:
https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/37

>  > I didn't want to comment on the update. Where would the
> right place to
>  > discuss this be?
>  
>  desktop(a)lists.fedoraproject.org please. 
Lovely. I've (re-)subscribed to the list and am sending my reply there
too, so that this thread can continue there.

One last thing: I'm not too well versed with how the Changes process
works, but shouldn't this quite major new feature be announced to the
community similar to the other changes?

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Policy

-- 
Thanks again,
Regards,

Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD"

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha