Shipping package metadata in a package

[Simo Sorce]

On Fri, 2014-01-24 at 10:01 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm after some advice / ideas. When you install Fedora 20/21 and then
> launch gnome-software it has to go and download some metadata before
> it can show anything. This is a pretty bad first experience,
> considering subsequent runs of gnome-software just open straight away.
> GNOME Software operates on the logic that *any* version of the
> metadata is better than nothing, and only refreshes once a week when
> the user is idle.
> 
> There are two ways to fix the jarring UX. We could either ship the
> fedora package metadata pre-prepared in PackageKit, maybe using
> something like %ghost so the new metadata is ignored. The other way is
> to start the metadata downloading in the initial-start wizard thing,
> although in practice the download takes a couple of minutes to
> complete, and the wizard typically takes much less than that before
> the user has configured everything. The downside to shipping prepared
> metadata is that the package size is larger, and that the metadata
> would be *very* out of date after a year or so.
> 
> I'm open to ideas, thanks.

Does it need all the data upfront ?

Maybe you can have a small place with initial metadata that contains a
subset of the packages and is quick to download so you can show
something then in the background start downloading the real full
metadata and update the UI as data comes in ?

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York