A software center for Fedora

[Aleksandar Kurtakov]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Giovanni Campagna" <scampa.giovanni at gmail.com>
> To: devel at lists.fedoraproject.org
> Sent: Saturday, November 26, 2011 1:03:27 AM
> Subject: A software center for Fedora
> 
> As promised in my previous mail, here is what I find that's lacking
> in
> Fedora, compared to the direct competition (Ubuntu, Debian,
> OpenSuse),
> and recently even some proprietary systems: we don't have an
> application
> installer.
> While we do have two nice UIs (gpk-application and apper) for package
> management, having to deal with packages, with no icons and no
> translations is not appropriate for end users. Instead, I think it
> would
> be appriopriate to follow the Ubuntu path and recognize the
> applications
> from .desktop files, because that is what will end up in the app
> launcher.
> 
> Since this is free software, we already have a complete software
> center
> available, straight from launchpad.net/software-center.
> (Actually, it doesn't yet work on Fedora, partly because of unmet
> dependencies, but those are just technical bugs, and I don't think it
> would be difficult to have something running soon)
> What is missing, though, is the data, representing the applications
> available in fedora repositories.
> 
> Long long ago (march 2009), a package was proposed for inclusion,
> which
> contained application data, in a format understood by
> software-center,
> for fedora at that time. This package was initially rejected, then
> one
> year later FESCo ruled that it did not actually break packaging
> guidelines, yet it disappeared.
> 
> Back to present, it's almost 2012. I'm here and I want to do whatever
> is
> required, at all layers, to ensure that application data is correctly
> generated, updated, and downloaded, at all times and for all users.
> This
> may involve changes in our repository infrastructure, in yum,
> packagekit
> and maybe in other places as well.


IIRC and think about the same package - this was a package containing data that is part of repos metadata, 
without any idea how it would be for kept uptodate with latest packages. From time to time updates is not an option obviously.
You have a noble goal to improve user experience but please whatever you do, don't do anything that will require every packager 
to do something - it won't work and I'm pretty sure that many maintainers would happily give you commit rights to their packages
but nothing more (I'm surely one of them).
This shouldn't be discouraging you - history has proven that once you have something cool people will happily work on it.
For the missing icons for non installed software - having something like the filelist db in the repo containing only the icons from 
.desktop files might work though the size of it might be a concern. But if you do that on the repos side I'm pretty sure that adding 
support for it to gpk/apper would be an easy task.

Regards,
Alex

> 
> I think this is specifically a Fedora feature, as it involves the
> whole
> distribution and touches many groups at the same time, which explains
> why I proposed it here instead of anywhere else. If you think it's
> worth
> it, I'd like to propose it as an official Fedora 17 Feature, and I'll
> happily write the wiki page.
> 
> I hope that some people from the relevant group will point me to the
> right place (perhaps starting from what happened to
> fedora-app-install...), and I hope you like the idea in general.
> 
> Giovanni
> 
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