Adding X-AppInstall-Package to all applications at rpm build time

[Richard Hughes]

What would people think about doing this in #fedora.spec files?

# make the software center load faster
desktop-file-edit %{buildroot}%{_datadir}/applications/*.desktop \
    --set-key=X-AppInstall-Package --set-value=%{name}

It makes the software center load much faster as we don't have to
lookup what package owns the desktop file[1] before we can show the
UI. "X-AppInstall-Package" is an extension that Ubuntu has been using
for nearly a decade.

I can shave over 250ms off the gnome-software cold-start time if most
applications set "X-AppInstall-Package". I've investigated perhaps
doing this automatically using a brp script in rpm, but this fails as
it can't add a dep for desktop-file-utils (which most apps should
already have as they should be validating the .desktop file) and that
the .desktop file might not be in %{name} but some sub-package which
we don't know as the brp is done globally on the buildroot.

Ideas, comments and feedback welcome. I'd be willing to edit the 50 or
so desktop packages we have in the default install myself if we can't
find an automatic way to do this. SUSE says they want to do the same
as us if it helps.

Richard.

[1] so we can show if it's installed, available in the repos, or an
update exists for it.

[Bill Nottingham]

Richard Hughes ([e-mail]) said:
> What would people think about doing this in #fedora.spec files?
>
> # make the software center load faster
> desktop-file-edit %{buildroot}%{_datadir}/applications/*.desktop \
>     --set-key=X-AppInstall-Package --set-value=%{name}
>
> It makes the software center load much faster as we don't have to
> lookup what package owns the desktop file[1] before we can show the
> UI. "X-AppInstall-Package" is an extension that Ubuntu has been using
> for nearly a decade.

It seems a reasonable enough optimization, although you'd obviously still
need to the fallback to querying the database.

Bill

[Richard Hughes]

On 2 October 2013 15:46, Bill Nottingham  wrote:
> It seems a reasonable enough optimization, although you'd obviously still
> need to the fallback to querying the database.

Right; the amount of delay at startup is proportional to the number of
requests we do. Do you think it's acceptable to add this snippet to
~50 desktop (mostly GNOME) packages without filing bug reports? I'm a
provenpackager if that matters.

Richard.

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 2:47 PM, Richard Hughes  wrote:
> What would people think about doing this in #fedora.spec files?
>
> # make the software center load faster
> desktop-file-edit %{buildroot}%{_datadir}/applications/*.desktop \
>     --set-key=X-AppInstall-Package --set-value=%{name}

(No, this does not really answer your specific question.)

"That we need facilities in the packaging system to be able to make
such a change in a single place, so that it would affect all
packages."

I suppose the Flock ... discussions ... about using Conary to build
RPMs have gone nowhere (I at least can't find a working canonical
Conary download page or SCM, so that's that) - but we do need to
improve the tooling, with or without having Conary to fall back on.
    Mirek

[Till Maas]

On Wed, Oct 02, 2013 at 01:47:57PM +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> What would people think about doing this in #fedora.spec files?
>
> # make the software center load faster
> desktop-file-edit %{buildroot}%{_datadir}/applications/*.desktop \
>     --set-key=X-AppInstall-Package --set-value=%{name}

This does not take subpackages into account. Not sure, how relevant it
is for the 50 packages you plan to adjust, but it would be an issue for
e.g. wireshark-gnome.

Nevertheless, if there is a way to do this properly automatically, I
would welcome this.

Regards
Till

[Richard Hughes]

On 2 October 2013 18:55, Till Maas  wrote:
> This does not take subpackages into account. Not sure, how relevant it
> is for the 50 packages you plan to adjust, but it would be an issue for
> e.g. wireshark-gnome.

Sure, in this case I'd have to manually change %{name} to the subpackage name.
> Nevertheless, if there is a way to do this properly automatically, I
> would welcome this.

You and me both! :) If you've got any ideas, I'm really all ears :)

Richard