On 04/09/2014 04:53 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
From the desktop/workstation perspective, here are a few things I
would
like to see if we decide to work on this:
Support for a new locale is more or less like a 'system extension' for
the OS. It would be good to define clear rules for what it means to
provide a subpackage that becomes part of this system extension.
Yes, but my guess this is not very complicated. Natural languages are
pretty straight forward. All other 'system extension' will basically
come with their own description. We just have to make sure that the
description as shown to the user is not completely ignored by the
packages using it.
In an ideal world, this could even be automatic and pattern-based
(e.g.
if you install anything into /usr/lib64/gstreamer-1.0, you are providing
a 'codec' extension, and all the files below that directory belong to
it).
*cough* *cough*
To present this in the UI, we need to know the available
'extension
points' (either a fixed list, or a way to enumerate them), as well as
the installed and available extensions for each, including suitable
metadata (name+short description at least).
We need the rethink the whole packaging UI anyway. Comps still has all
its known problems. SoftwareCenter has its own, very special view on the
packages, and no one has a clue how to make use of the weak weak
dependencies (which are not completely unlike optional packages in comps).
So making the number of installed and available packages more manageable
is one of the next big things that need to be done after the basic
infrastructure is in place.
Florian