Proposal: Don't show applications in the software center with XPM icons

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 03/07/2014 11:21 AM, Richard Hughes wrote:
> On 7 March 2014 14:08, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro at gnome.org> wrote:
>> Microsoft, Apple, and Google set requirements that apps must follow if
>> they want to appear in the software center in order to ensure a good
>> user experience.
> This is something I absolutely want to do. We already rate the
> applications in GNOME 3.12 depending on how many positive attributes
> they have (the star ratings) and I think it's fine to set a minimum
> standard and slowly raise the bar over time. Showing 500 applications
> that hits some absolute minimum level is much better than showing an
> additional 500 basically crap applications.
>
This decision should belong to the user, though. It's one thing to 
default to showing only five-star applications (GTK2, icon with 
transparency, AppData with translations) while allowing the user to 
widen the criteria to show more applications. It is quite another thing 
to make an unilateral decision to take out an entire class that fails to 
satisfy some arbitrary requirement.

I do realize that the app installer becomes more complex, with the 
'number of stars' selector, and having to make up application data that 
the app itself failed to provide, but I think cost/benefit justifies 
that effort.

I feel old and cranky arguing this point but the app markets for 
portable devices are a _counterexample_ to a thesis that pretty metadata 
guarantees better application quality. At least on portable devices the 
old-line stuff simply does not install so it is irrelevant; on Fedora it 
can be installed and would be useful to someone, if only they can 
discover its existence when using the pretty, default application 
installer. As another data point, I just introduced 'units' to another 
person that missed it in spite of being in the business of scientific 
data/calculations. Fedora should make it easier, not more difficult, for 
people to discover such useful things.
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