yum appmarket

[Martin Bacovsky]

On Thursday, August 19, 2010 05:46 pm, seth vidal wrote 
> I mentioned this on:
> http://skvidal.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/fedora-app-market-proof-of-concept/
> 
> last night but I thought I'd bring it up here:
> 
> Yesterday someone was talking about installing apps in fedora and how it
> was hard to figure out what to install/try b/c there were too much STUFF
> in fedora. They suggested an ‘app store’ like functionality. I explained
> that all the resources to do something like that exist in the
> infrastructure yum and friends offer now. I decided to prove that
> concept a bit.
> 
> The concept of an ‘app’ is pretty amorphous but I decided to just use
> what Colin Walters said was his definition of an ‘app’ – which is any
> pkg containing a .desktop file. So I just whipped up a simple tool to
> dump out an xml-file of a format yum is already familiar with based on
> that criteria:
> 
> http://skvidal.fedorapeople.org/misc/appfinder.py
> 
> Running that generates an xml file with only the ‘apps’ defined.
> 
> Great. Then I wrote a yum plugin to access and use this data.
> 
> and I stuck it in this repo
> 
> 1. copy this file into /etc/yum.repos.d/
> 
> 2. run: yum install yum-plugin-appmarket
> 
> Now yum will have a few new commands available to it:
> 
> app-install    Install an App
> app-list       List Apps
> app-remove     Remove an App
> app-search     Search for an App
> 
> Some examples:
> 
> yum app-search yum
> 
> won’t turn up ‘yum’ but it will turn up ‘yumex’.
> 
> Fancy, huh?
> 
> Now, the concept of an app can be refined in many ways but this is just
> to prove that the infrastructure has been available.
> 
> -sv

This is very nice idea. 

I'm interested in cooperation if you are going to develop this concept futher. 

I work on application database part of Fedora PkgDB and think it could be most effective to use it as 
data source. The app finding algoritihm is not perfect yet but I am working on improvements. 

I also believe that when application db gets more mature more fedora users will provide their input. 
Then we would be able to take the user experience into account and app search would be even more 
interesting.

Martin