Shipping package metadata in a package
Hi all,
I'm after some advice / ideas. When you install Fedora 20/21 and then
launch gnome-software it has to go and download some metadata before
it can show anything. This is a pretty bad first experience,
considering subsequent runs of gnome-software just open straight away.
GNOME Software operates on the logic that *any* version of the
metadata is better than nothing, and only refreshes once a week when
the user is idle.
There are two ways to fix the jarring UX. We could either ship the
fedora package metadata pre-prepared in PackageKit, maybe using
something like %ghost so the new metadata is ignored. The other way is
to start the metadata downloading in the initial-start wizard thing,
although in practice the download takes a couple of minutes to
complete, and the wizard typically takes much less than that before
the user has configured everything. The downside to shipping prepared
metadata is that the package size is larger, and that the metadata
would be *very* out of date after a year or so.
I'm open to ideas, thanks.
Richard.