Heads up; F22 will require applications to ship appdata to be listed in software center

[Josh Boyer]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 1:41 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2014-02-14 at 13:02 -0500, Przemek Klosowski wrote:
>> On 01/28/2014 03:12 PM, Richard Hughes wrote:
>>
>> > On 28 January 2014 18:43, Przemek Klosowski <przemek.klosowski at nist.gov> wrote:
>> > > There are two separate issues here: 'abandonment', and 'GUIness'. As to the
>> > > latter, I think it's a mistake to have a primary application installation
>> > > tool that only deals with GUI apps, because it relegates text-based tools,
>> > > such as 'units', to a second-class status of being hard to find and to
>> > > install.
>> > That's not the tool we've designed and built. We've built a GUI
>> > application installer, not a package installer.
>> [sorry fo the delayed answer---I got wrapped up and had this draft
>> sitting open for two weeks]
>>
>> While it's not the fault of the installer,  I am concerned about that
>> distinction. For better or worse, a lot of useful tools seem to be out
>> of scope for a 'GUI application installer'. GCC, perl, git, octave, R,
>> units, mysql/sqlite3,  this kind of thing. It doesn't even make sense
>> to shoehorn them into GUI app world by embedding them in terminals,
>> because their natural environment is command-line interaction.
>>
>> The emphasis on GUI is great, but it should enhance rather than
>> deprecate the old-style interactive command model that arguably is the
>> core idea in Unix. Your tool, while improving the GUI app experience,
>> could also support non GUI software---or at least not completely
>> ignore its existence. I do get it that there is a class of GUI users
>> that need to see a window with buttons and help, and non-GUI apps
>> simply baffle them with a blinking command prompt, at best. OTOH, I
>> believe there should be a setting in the installer about that, "do not
>> show me commandline software". I believe that it should be off by
>> default, but maybe I am wrong about that.
>>
>> Do you really think it's impossible?
>
> Do you actually want to use a tool like Software to install gcc?
>
> I just can't see why you would. You know gcc is what you want. You don't
> need a shiny description and some screenshots and user reviews on a 1-5
> star scale. 'yum install gcc' seems a massively better fit. Who would it
> benefit to have something like gcc in Software?

I agree listing gcc or make or binutils in Software would be odd.
While I don't wish to spin off on a tangent, it might be possible to
have a meta "app" entry for things like "DevTools" that installs all
of those at once though.  This would likely line up well with Software
Collections and such as well (at least in my tiny head).

josh