F21 System Wide Change: Application Installer Continued

[Jaroslav Reznik]

= Proposed System Wide Change:  Application Installer Continued = 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/AppInstallerContinued

Change owner(s): Richard Hughes for the implementation, Ryan Lerch and Allan 
Day for the design <rhughes at redhat.com>

Fully integrate the new application installer with Fedora, and complete its 
feature set.

== Detailed Description ==
gnome-software will support installing system add-ons such as fonts and 
codecs. It will show additional metadata for applications: screenshots, 
ratings, other details. We will also work with the Fedora infrastructure team 
to obtain the metadata online for all applications instead of shipping it 
statically for a limited set.

The metadata for application needs to be expanded and its quality monitored. 
Screenshots need to be taken or updated.

The update monitoring and downloading functionality will be moved from the 
gnome-settings-daemon updates plugin into gnome-software. To implement this, 
gnome-software will be turned into a session service, and the updates plugin 
will be removed from gnome-settings-daemon.

A gnome-shell search provider will offer installable applications as search 
results.

gnome-software will allow to customize the app folders that are displayed in 
the gnome-shell app picker.

We will switch to using the hawkey PackageKit backend.

We also want to try to integrate Fedora accounts for collecting ratings and 
installed package lists, but this requires coordination with the Fedora 
infrastructure team.

The priorities for gnome-software 3.12 are also tracked upstream [1].

== Scope ==
* Proposal owners:
** Add add-on support (DONE)
** Display additional metadata in details page (DONE)
** Implement a GNOME shell search provider (DONE)
** Turn gnome-software into a session service and take over updates plugin 
functionality (DONE)
** Implement app folder configuration (DONE)
** Turn search into search-as-you-type
** Implement Fedora account integration
** Replace old gnome-packagekit package installation dialogs (DONE)
** Switch PackageKit to use the hawkey backend (DONE)

* Infrastructure:
** Extract metadata and icons when building packages in koji [2]
** Make metadata available for packaged applications in Fedora
** Make application icons available
** Make application screenshots available
** Make it possible to create Fedora accounts from the client-side
** Allow storing small amount of per-user data for users with a Fedora account

* Application packagers
** Add application metadata to their packages, ideally sending it upstream

* Marketing, documentation
** Assist with review and quality control of application metadata
** Assist with selecting featured applications

* Policies and guidelines:
** We want to use the hawkey backend in PackageKit while the default 
commandline utility is still yum; this kind of separation was rejected by 
Fesco in the past for zif, will need to ask again (DONE, approved 
conditionally)
** The packaging guidelines for applications should be updated to require 
application metadata in addition to a desktop file
** The update experience will also benefit from proposed changes to batch 
updates, but batched updates are not a strict requirement for the new app 
installer

[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Software#Priorities_.26_Plans 
[2] https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/5721 rel-eng ticket