Hello! (Sorry for writing this mail so late, but I was extremely busy with university stuff and - well - this project, so I haven't found the time to write this mail before.)
I am Matthias Klumpp and I will work on making the AppStream[1] project work for all distributions as part of the Google Summer of Code this year. Many thanks to OpenSUSE for offering this oportunity! :-) A little bit about myself: I study Molecular Biomedicine in my second semester at University of Bonn in Germany. I contribute to KDE (mainly to Apper, the PackageKit-based KDE package manager) and I am PackageKit upstream developer, as well as the maintainer of Listaller, a cross-distro application installer, which has the goal to make installations of 3rd-party apps on multiple distributions as easy, generic and integrated as possible, by using just one package. (Yes, 3rd-party repos and native packages have some issues, just before you ask the obvious question ^^) I am Debian Maintainer and maintain all PackageKit and most PackageKit-related packages there. This means I also use Debian, so doing a project for OpenSUSE might look strange on the first look, but as this is a cross-distro project, it doesn't matter much. I also know OpenSUSE. If you have been involved in the AppStream project, you might already know me, as I am involved in the project since it started. (Sadly I wasn't able to attend the meeting in Nürnberg) In general kudos to OpenSUSE for doing the cross-distro GSoC tasks which no other distribution does! OpenSUSE has always been the distribution with the highest activity in this area, although they could’ve said “we don’t care about collaboration and interoperability”, which would’ve been perfectly sane. My greatest respect for that open-minded attitude and I’m really happy to work with you all! I already tweaked the Software-Center a little, so starting time is up to 420% faster, and we just need one call to PackageKit anymore, instead of doing thousands of Resolve() calls. There is more to come, right now we're tuning PackageKit to serve the requirements for a Software-Center. If you have suggestions, please let me know! I'll write reports about my progress to OpenSUSE mailinglist, I think I can also send them to this list, or you can follow my blog[2] to stay informed. (I'll write some articles about what I do there, later) It's cool to work on a cross-distro project for OpenSUSE and I'm looking forward to a great time! If you have any questions regarding anything written above, feel free to ask! :-) Matthias Klumpp -------- [1]: http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/AppStream [2]: http://blog.tenstral.net _______________________________________________ Distributions mailing list Distributions@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/distributions
