Re: A software center for Fedora
On 12/07/2011 09:50 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: On Wed, Dec 07, 2011 at 02:23:05PM +0100, Giovanni Campagna wrote: Il giorno sab, 03/12/2011 alle 22.58 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi ha scritto: Yep. This is a pseudo-bug. Because of the way people have been interpreting the spec for .desktop files, all of these provide .desktop files where the name is Terminal. So they're all placed on the same page. This could be fixed in the .desktop files (Judging from past experience, I think that's a losing effort). Or someone could code up some other ways of extracting and reconciling this information. There are other things that could be enhanced in this. For instance, there's currently no extraction or recording of information about applications that lack a .desktop file. That's wrong, as explain by Freedesktop menu spec. You should group applications according to the desktop file id, which is the desktop file path, minus /usr/share/applications, with .desktop stripped and with / replaced by -. This way, gnome-terminal (which has /usr/share/applications/gnome-terminal.desktop) becomes gnome-terminal, while konsole (which has /usr/share/applications/kde4/konsole.desktop) becomes kde4-konsole, and no conflicts are possible (otherwise, you would get a menu conflict and/or a rpm file conflict). Name, GenericName, X-GNOME-FullName, etc. are user visible strings and should not be used as identifiers. Except.. the URL is for a user visible string (just like a menu entry). At least, that's what I think the intention was. We can ask mbacovsk (CC'd) if that was in fact intentional. If not, feel free to change it. My intention was to map applications from all active fedora and epel releases. I found out that desktop file ids were not reliable identifier as they sometimes differed among releases. So I chosed to use the application name as the grouping attribute (it differed as well) and I had to implement some heuristic, trying to guess which desktop files belong together. One of the requirements was user to be able to install selected application from the web, so I had to match the desktop file to the respective rpm in each of the releases. I created a few patches to make the heuristic more precise and eliminate false matches(it matches the exec and distro executables as in some cases the .desktop and executable it triggers are not in the same rpm) but didn't deploy them since then as it makes the pkgdb a lot slower then it is today. I was thinking about fulltext search as a solution but newer it make it into reality. I'm open to discussion about necessary changes to make pkgdb's data usefull for you. For a start I'll look what is wrong with the JSON exports :) Regards, Martin As for repodata, you mention tags, but I can't find them here, in primary, comps or other (and I don't see anything else in mirrors). I hit a mirror and browsed around. Here's the one for the F16 x86_64 update repo: http://mirrors.xmission.com/fedora/updates/16/x86_64/repodata/pkgtags.sqlite.gz Interesting. In fact, the file exists, but only for updates repo, not for fedora. Is there a reason for that? (I'm looking at http://mirrors.xmission.com/fedora/releases/16/Everything/x86_64/os/repodata/) Not sure. Maybe one of the rel-eng's would know the answer to that. -Toshio -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Il giorno gio, 08/12/2011 alle 19.41 +0100, Martin Bacovsky ha scritto: On 12/07/2011 09:50 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: On Wed, Dec 07, 2011 at 02:23:05PM +0100, Giovanni Campagna wrote: [...] Except.. the URL is for a user visible string (just like a menu entry). At least, that's what I think the intention was. We can ask mbacovsk (CC'd) if that was in fact intentional. If not, feel free to change it. My intention was to map applications from all active fedora and epel releases. I found out that desktop file ids were not reliable identifier as they sometimes differed among releases. So I chosed to use the application name as the grouping attribute (it differed as well) and I had to implement some heuristic, trying to guess which desktop files belong together. This is indeed a problem, but IMHO we should optimize for the single version case - at the cost of having multiple entries for the same app. As policy, we can additionally ask maintainers and upstreams to avoid changing the name of a desktop file. Again, the desktop file id is what app launchers group on, so it's the only reasonable field to use, if we want consistency between the software installer and the launcher. One of the requirements was user to be able to install selected application from the web, so I had to match the desktop file to the respective rpm in each of the releases. Is this really a requirement? To me, installing from the web (as currently implemented, not with the packagekit plugin) is just a security hole, as you're installing untrusted packages and sidestepping the yum repository. I created a few patches to make the heuristic more precise and eliminate false matches(it matches the exec and distro executables as in some cases the .desktop and executable it triggers are not in the same rpm) but didn't deploy them since then as it makes the pkgdb a lot slower then it is today. I was thinking about fulltext search as a solution but newer it make it into reality. I think fulltext search needs to be made local, to be efficient. I heard there were already plans for using Xapian, so let's see what turns out. I'm open to discussion about necessary changes to make pkgdb's data usefull for you. For a start I'll look what is wrong with the JSON exports :) Great, thanks! Giovanni signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Il giorno sab, 03/12/2011 alle 22.58 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi ha scritto:
On Sat, Dec 03, 2011 at 04:13:37PM +0100, Giovanni Campagna wrote:
Il giorno ven, 02/12/2011 alle 16.37 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi ha scritto:
On Fri, Dec 02, 2011 at 09:39:31PM +0100, Giovanni Campagna wrote:
packagedb seems an interesting project, for storing ratings and reviews,
and it could be a candidate to replace the Ubuntu backend. Is there some
documentation somewhere? Does it provide some webservice API (REST,
JSON, SOAP, anything)
It does. Many of the URLs that you can use to view information in a web
browser will return the equivalent information as JSON data. Not all of
the
URLs are fast enough for what you may want to do with them now, though --
we
may want to craft some custom methods that give you the information you
need
faster or in bulk. Another option for some of the things is to have users
enter it into the packagedb but to export it via the repodata. This was
done for the tag information for instance. From reading one of Richard's
review request bugs, it looks like people wished to do the same thing with
icons but there were possible legal problems with that approach (the legal
problem seemed to cover distributing the icons in either the repodata or
a package :-( ) so you'd probably need to pioneer a different approach
here.
Uhm...
curl -H Accept: application/json
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/applications/Terminal results in
500 Internal error.
Yep. I said many URLs. If you want to enable this for this URL we just
need to add an
@expose('json')
decorator to that method. But, I'm not sure if that URL will serve your
purposes or not... my experience is that it is a bit slow as currently
implemented. Plus you'd need to query the packagedb for every package
you're looking up which introduces the latency of round-tripping to the
server and back. This may be a good place to start and then after you
understand where the bottlenecks are, you may want to work on some custom
pkgdb-server methods to aggregate data.
I was thinking to use that url to find reviews and screenshots for each
application. This is something that software-center shows for each app
individually, so making a separate request is not a problem.
As for ratings/icons, we may need aggregate data instead, except that
still
Also, packagedb seems to be coalescing different packages and apps in
one (same example: konsole, gnome-terminal and xfce4-terminal are all in
the same page).
Yep. This is a pseudo-bug. Because of the way people have been
interpreting the spec for .desktop files, all of these provide .desktop
files where the name is Terminal. So they're all placed on the same page.
This could be fixed in the .desktop files (Judging from past experience,
I think that's a losing effort). Or someone could code up some other ways
of extracting and reconciling this information. There are other things that
could be enhanced in this. For instance, there's currently no extraction or
recording of information about applications that lack a .desktop file.
That's wrong, as explain by Freedesktop menu spec. You should group
applications according to the desktop file id, which is the desktop file
path, minus /usr/share/applications, with .desktop stripped and with /
replaced by -. This way, gnome-terminal (which
has /usr/share/applications/gnome-terminal.desktop) becomes
gnome-terminal, while konsole (which
has /usr/share/applications/kde4/konsole.desktop) becomes kde4-konsole,
and no conflicts are possible (otherwise, you would get a menu conflict
and/or a rpm file conflict).
Name, GenericName, X-GNOME-FullName, etc. are user visible strings and
should not be used as identifiers.
As for repodata, you mention tags, but I can't find them here, in
primary, comps or other (and I don't see anything else in mirrors).
I hit a mirror and browsed around. Here's the one for the F16 x86_64 update
repo:
http://mirrors.xmission.com/fedora/updates/16/x86_64/repodata/pkgtags.sqlite.gz
Interesting. In fact, the file exists, but only for updates repo, not
for fedora. Is there a reason for that?
(I'm looking at
http://mirrors.xmission.com/fedora/releases/16/Everything/x86_64/os/repodata/)
Giovanni
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Re: A software center for Fedora
On Wed, Dec 07, 2011 at 02:23:05PM +0100, Giovanni Campagna wrote: Il giorno sab, 03/12/2011 alle 22.58 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi ha scritto: Yep. This is a pseudo-bug. Because of the way people have been interpreting the spec for .desktop files, all of these provide .desktop files where the name is Terminal. So they're all placed on the same page. This could be fixed in the .desktop files (Judging from past experience, I think that's a losing effort). Or someone could code up some other ways of extracting and reconciling this information. There are other things that could be enhanced in this. For instance, there's currently no extraction or recording of information about applications that lack a .desktop file. That's wrong, as explain by Freedesktop menu spec. You should group applications according to the desktop file id, which is the desktop file path, minus /usr/share/applications, with .desktop stripped and with / replaced by -. This way, gnome-terminal (which has /usr/share/applications/gnome-terminal.desktop) becomes gnome-terminal, while konsole (which has /usr/share/applications/kde4/konsole.desktop) becomes kde4-konsole, and no conflicts are possible (otherwise, you would get a menu conflict and/or a rpm file conflict). Name, GenericName, X-GNOME-FullName, etc. are user visible strings and should not be used as identifiers. Except.. the URL is for a user visible string (just like a menu entry). At least, that's what I think the intention was. We can ask mbacovsk (CC'd) if that was in fact intentional. If not, feel free to change it. As for repodata, you mention tags, but I can't find them here, in primary, comps or other (and I don't see anything else in mirrors). I hit a mirror and browsed around. Here's the one for the F16 x86_64 update repo: http://mirrors.xmission.com/fedora/updates/16/x86_64/repodata/pkgtags.sqlite.gz Interesting. In fact, the file exists, but only for updates repo, not for fedora. Is there a reason for that? (I'm looking at http://mirrors.xmission.com/fedora/releases/16/Everything/x86_64/os/repodata/) Not sure. Maybe one of the rel-eng's would know the answer to that. -Toshio pgp59F7geDtzg.pgp Description: PGP signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Toshio Kuratomi (a.bad...@gmail.com) said: As for repodata, you mention tags, but I can't find them here, in primary, comps or other (and I don't see anything else in mirrors). I hit a mirror and browsed around. Here's the one for the F16 x86_64 update repo: http://mirrors.xmission.com/fedora/updates/16/x86_64/repodata/pkgtags.sqlite.gz Interesting. In fact, the file exists, but only for updates repo, not for fedora. Is there a reason for that? (I'm looking at http://mirrors.xmission.com/fedora/releases/16/Everything/x86_64/os/repodata/) Not sure. Maybe one of the rel-eng's would know the answer to that. My assumption would be that it's only inserted via bodhi, but that's just a guess. Bill -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Sat, 2011-12-03 at 16:13 +0100, Giovanni Campagna wrote: curl -H Accept: application/json https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/applications/Terminal results in 500 Internal error This one is not that is true and that can be fixed. For an example of the json output see: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/gnome-terminal vs https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/gnome-terminal?tg_format=json Pierre -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Toshio Kuratomi wrote: Yep. This is a pseudo-bug. Because of the way people have been interpreting the spec for .desktop files, all of these provide .desktop files where the name is Terminal. So they're all placed on the same page. This could be fixed in the .desktop files (Judging from past experience, I think that's a losing effort). Or someone could code up some other ways of extracting and reconciling this information. There are other things that could be enhanced in this. For instance, there's currently no extraction or recording of information about applications that lack a .desktop file. Konsole actually has: Name=Konsole GenericName=Terminal as it's supposed to by the spec. You need to fix pkgdb: Name ≠ GenericName. Of course, there's also stuff (such as the other 2 terminals involved) stuffing generic names into Name, which needs to be fixed… Kevin Kofler -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Sun, Dec 04, 2011 at 07:08:11PM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote: Toshio Kuratomi wrote: Yep. This is a pseudo-bug. Because of the way people have been interpreting the spec for .desktop files, all of these provide .desktop files where the name is Terminal. So they're all placed on the same page. This could be fixed in the .desktop files (Judging from past experience, I think that's a losing effort). Or someone could code up some other ways of extracting and reconciling this information. There are other things that could be enhanced in this. For instance, there's currently no extraction or recording of information about applications that lack a .desktop file. Konsole actually has: Name=Konsole GenericName=Terminal as it's supposed to by the spec. You need to fix pkgdb: Name ≠ GenericName. Of course, there's also stuff (such as the other 2 terminals involved) stuffing generic names into Name, which needs to be fixed… Looking at the pkgdb page, it looks like kdebase is only showing up for the Terminal app for F-12. Looking at that old package, there is a .desktop that contains Name=Terminal there but it's not konsole: ./usr/share/kde4/apps/kappfinder/apps/System/Terminal/aterm.desktop:Name=Terminal I'm going to be looking into getting rid of the EOL release builds next week so this will probably cease to be a problem but I do wonder if this is a bug. Is kappfinder just using the .desktop format to keep its own database? Should the pkgdb import script just scan for files in regex: /usr/share/applications/.*\.desktop Let me know if that's the case and I can probably find where the code is scanning for .desktop files and fix it. -Toshio pgpkZhpB8ulrT.pgp Description: PGP signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Toshio Kuratomi wrote: Looking at the pkgdb page, it looks like kdebase is only showing up for the Terminal app for F-12. Looking at that old package, there is a .desktop that contains Name=Terminal there but it's not konsole: ./usr/share/kde4/apps/kappfinder/apps/System/Terminal/aterm.desktop:Name=Terminal I'm going to be looking into getting rid of the EOL release builds next week so this will probably cease to be a problem but I do wonder if this is a bug. Is kappfinder just using the .desktop format to keep its own database? Should the pkgdb import script just scan for files in regex: /usr/share/applications/.*\.desktop kappfinder is dead and buried (so don't worry about that one too much), but using something like the aforementioned regex does make some sense in following where to look for .desktop's per the spec (in $XDG_DATA_DIRS/applications I think) -- rex -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Toshio Kuratomi wrote: Is kappfinder just using the .desktop format to keep its own database? Kappfinder is a relict from ancient times where KDE apps would only register themselves in KDE menus, GNOME apps would only register themselves in GNOME menus, and everything else would usually do neither (or in some cases it would attempt to register in one or both of the menus, with varying success). In that era, it made sense for KDE (*) to go and look for installed applications with no menu entries, adding them to the menu as it found them. Thanks to freedesktop.org, those times are long gone. What kappfinder did was that it searched for installed applications it had a .desktop file for, and if found (without a menu entry already present), installed that .desktop file in the menu. Note that none of those applications were actually part of kdebase, only the .desktop files were. Those .desktop files would only be installed into the actual menu if the application was actually found on the system at runtime. As this no longer makes any sense in the current freedesktop.org times, kappfinder was discontinued by upstream and removed from the KDE Software Compilation. Thus, you won't find it in current Fedora releases anymore. Kevin Kofler (*) Yes, the software was called just KDE back then. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 1:37 AM, Toshio Kuratomi a.bad...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 02, 2011 at 09:39:31PM +0100, Giovanni Campagna wrote: packagedb seems an interesting project, for storing ratings and reviews, and it could be a candidate to replace the Ubuntu backend. Is there some documentation somewhere? Does it provide some webservice API (REST, JSON, SOAP, anything) It does. Many of the URLs that you can use to view information in a web browser will return the equivalent information as JSON data. Not all of the URLs are fast enough for what you may want to do with them now, though -- we may want to craft some custom methods that give you the information you need faster or in bulk. Another option for some of the things is to have users enter it into the packagedb but to export it via the repodata. This was done for the tag information for instance. From reading one of Richard's review request bugs, it looks like people wished to do the same thing with icons but there were possible legal problems with that approach (the legal problem seemed to cover distributing the icons in either the repodata or a package :-( ) so you'd probably need to pioneer a different approach here. I don't buy the legal problem. If we can ship the icons in the distribution split into multiple packages we can ship them aggregated into one as well. You can't link icons so the license of the icons should and cannot prevent others from being in the same package / tarball / whatever. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Sat, Dec 03, 2011 at 10:13:49AM +0100, drago01 wrote: I don't buy the legal problem. If we can ship the icons in the distribution split into multiple packages we can ship them aggregated into one as well. You can't link icons so the license of the icons should and cannot prevent others from being in the same package / tarball / whatever. IANAL so I just do what spot tells me we need to do things in a satisfactory manner. If you're going to work on this and really really want to work on one of the approaches that he's nixed, please take it up with him or the fedora-legal list. -Toshio pgpAfKcPMMrwV.pgp Description: PGP signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Il giorno ven, 02/12/2011 alle 16.37 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi ha scritto: On Fri, Dec 02, 2011 at 09:39:31PM +0100, Giovanni Campagna wrote: packagedb seems an interesting project, for storing ratings and reviews, and it could be a candidate to replace the Ubuntu backend. Is there some documentation somewhere? Does it provide some webservice API (REST, JSON, SOAP, anything) It does. Many of the URLs that you can use to view information in a web browser will return the equivalent information as JSON data. Not all of the URLs are fast enough for what you may want to do with them now, though -- we may want to craft some custom methods that give you the information you need faster or in bulk. Another option for some of the things is to have users enter it into the packagedb but to export it via the repodata. This was done for the tag information for instance. From reading one of Richard's review request bugs, it looks like people wished to do the same thing with icons but there were possible legal problems with that approach (the legal problem seemed to cover distributing the icons in either the repodata or a package :-( ) so you'd probably need to pioneer a different approach here. Uhm... curl -H Accept: application/json https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/applications/Terminal results in 500 Internal error. Also, packagedb seems to be coalescing different packages and apps in one (same example: konsole, gnome-terminal and xfce4-terminal are all in the same page). As for repodata, you mention tags, but I can't find them here, in primary, comps or other (and I don't see anything else in mirrors). Lastly, for icons, if legal says it's inacceptable to have a package/repodata blob with all of them, we could download them from packagedb on demand, where apparently you have them. I doubt that though, as other distros are packaging them without problems. There's also a good chance that we'll encounter some pieces of data that a software center would like to use but that we aren't storing or making public at the moment. If it's already present in the packages or something that users would contribute we can look into how to make that available for the software center to use. This will take coding time, however, so it would be something that you (or whoever is interested in working on backend support for the software center) would need to be willing to sink some time into. That's exactly why I'm here: to offer my time to build a great app software installation story for the next Fedora. Giovanni signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Sat, Dec 03, 2011 at 04:13:37PM +0100, Giovanni Campagna wrote:
Il giorno ven, 02/12/2011 alle 16.37 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi ha scritto:
On Fri, Dec 02, 2011 at 09:39:31PM +0100, Giovanni Campagna wrote:
packagedb seems an interesting project, for storing ratings and reviews,
and it could be a candidate to replace the Ubuntu backend. Is there some
documentation somewhere? Does it provide some webservice API (REST,
JSON, SOAP, anything)
It does. Many of the URLs that you can use to view information in a web
browser will return the equivalent information as JSON data. Not all of the
URLs are fast enough for what you may want to do with them now, though -- we
may want to craft some custom methods that give you the information you need
faster or in bulk. Another option for some of the things is to have users
enter it into the packagedb but to export it via the repodata. This was
done for the tag information for instance. From reading one of Richard's
review request bugs, it looks like people wished to do the same thing with
icons but there were possible legal problems with that approach (the legal
problem seemed to cover distributing the icons in either the repodata or
a package :-( ) so you'd probably need to pioneer a different approach here.
Uhm...
curl -H Accept: application/json
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/applications/Terminal results in
500 Internal error.
Yep. I said many URLs. If you want to enable this for this URL we just
need to add an
@expose('json')
decorator to that method. But, I'm not sure if that URL will serve your
purposes or not... my experience is that it is a bit slow as currently
implemented. Plus you'd need to query the packagedb for every package
you're looking up which introduces the latency of round-tripping to the
server and back. This may be a good place to start and then after you
understand where the bottlenecks are, you may want to work on some custom
pkgdb-server methods to aggregate data.
Also, packagedb seems to be coalescing different packages and apps in
one (same example: konsole, gnome-terminal and xfce4-terminal are all in
the same page).
Yep. This is a pseudo-bug. Because of the way people have been
interpreting the spec for .desktop files, all of these provide .desktop
files where the name is Terminal. So they're all placed on the same page.
This could be fixed in the .desktop files (Judging from past experience,
I think that's a losing effort). Or someone could code up some other ways
of extracting and reconciling this information. There are other things that
could be enhanced in this. For instance, there's currently no extraction or
recording of information about applications that lack a .desktop file.
As for repodata, you mention tags, but I can't find them here, in
primary, comps or other (and I don't see anything else in mirrors).
I hit a mirror and browsed around. Here's the one for the F16 x86_64 update
repo:
http://mirrors.xmission.com/fedora/updates/16/x86_64/repodata/pkgtags.sqlite.gz
Lastly, for icons, if legal says it's inacceptable to have a
package/repodata blob with all of them, we could download them from
packagedb on demand, where apparently you have them.
Yep. I believe that was an option that spot gave. If this is the route we
go we probably want to explore with spot what optimizations we could do that
would be okay from a legal standpoint (For instance, could a user request
a list of packages' icons and then we supply all of those icons as one
download via pkgdb.)
I doubt that
though, as other distros are packaging them without problems.
There are other things that other distros do that we don't for legal
reasons. We have to play by the rules that Fedora Legal (pretty much spot)
or Red Hat legal (transmitted to us via spot) hands down to us even when it
puts us at a disadvantage with respect to what other distros do who have
a different legal team with differing legal advice. Which is not to say
that you shouldn't talk to spot about where the lines that we cannot cross
lie -- you may be able to figure out an innovative way to satisfy the legal
requirements and provide a good user experience that way.
There's also a good chance that we'll encounter some pieces of data that
a software center would like to use but that we aren't storing or making
public at the moment. If it's already present in the packages or something
that users would contribute we can look into how to make that available for
the software center to use.
This will take coding time, however, so it would be something that you (or
whoever is interested in working on backend support for the software center)
would need to be willing to sink some time into.
That's exactly why I'm here: to offer my time to build a great app
software installation story for the next Fedora.
Excellent!
-Toshio
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Re: A software center for Fedora
On 12/01/2011 11:31 PM, Giovanni Campagna wrote: Seeing enough positive feedback on this (and seeing that after all, it works pretty well on my machine), I started an official Fedora 17 feature. You can find it at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SoftwareCenter Comments of course welcome, before I move this on to be ready for wrangler. Can you explain what will happen to gpk-application in your proposal? Have you talked to Richard Hughes about that? Rahul -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Giovanni Campagna wrote: Seeing enough positive feedback on this (and seeing that after all, it works pretty well on my machine), I started an official Fedora 17 feature. You can find it at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SoftwareCenter Comments of course welcome, before I move this on to be ready for wrangler. See: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Talk:Features/SoftwareCenter This feature needs to be modified to clarify the KDE situation: * Ubuntu's GNOME-based Software Center is not suitable for the KDE spin. * Kubuntu's apt-based Muon Software Center is not suitable for Fedora. * Apper, which we currently ship, supports software center functionality just fine, if it is provided at the distribution level. So in the KDE spin, we'd stick with Apper, we'd just have application installation functionality (finally) enabled in Apper. The feature as currently worded, wanting to replace Apper and to change wordings in the K Menu, is a no go. If you really want to propose replacing Apper, you have to bring this up in a KDE SIG meeting, but I'm fairly sure it will be shot down. (I definitely DON'T want to replace Apper with a GNOME app!) Likewise, replacing gnome-packagekit must be brought up with the GNOME and PackageKit maintainers. Kevin Kofler -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Il giorno mar, 29/11/2011 alle 08.07 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi ha scritto: On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 02:23:31PM +, Richard Hughes wrote: On 25 November 2011 23:31, Rex Dieter rdie...@math.unl.edu wrote: These? app-install (and friends) still pending review it seems, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488962 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488968 If the objections truly have been dropped, I'd be happy to help move this along. I got burned by the whole process. I got zero help from anyone in the fedora infrastructure team, Funny... I remember talking to you on multiple occassions, letting you know what pkgdb currently was storing in this area, what it could store if the code showed up, and the two people who had worked on that portion of pkgdb code in the past that you should talk to. Perhaps you're forgetting all of that since you ran into some stumbling block past that stage. packagedb seems an interesting project, for storing ratings and reviews, and it could be a candidate to replace the Ubuntu backend. Is there some documentation somewhere? Does it provide some webservice API (REST, JSON, SOAP, anything) Giovanni signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Il giorno ven, 02/12/2011 alle 22.33 +0100, Kevin Kofler ha scritto: Giovanni Campagna wrote: Seeing enough positive feedback on this (and seeing that after all, it works pretty well on my machine), I started an official Fedora 17 feature. You can find it at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SoftwareCenter Comments of course welcome, before I move this on to be ready for wrangler. See: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Talk:Features/SoftwareCenter This feature needs to be modified to clarify the KDE situation: * Ubuntu's GNOME-based Software Center is not suitable for the KDE spin. * Kubuntu's apt-based Muon Software Center is not suitable for Fedora. * Apper, which we currently ship, supports software center functionality just fine, if it is provided at the distribution level. So in the KDE spin, we'd stick with Apper, we'd just have application installation functionality (finally) enabled in Apper. That's fine for me, you can keep Apper. The Software Center would be in the distribution, just not installed by default, in the same way as apper can be installed on gnome now. The feature as currently worded, wanting to replace Apper and to change wordings in the K Menu, is a no go. If you really want to propose replacing Apper, you have to bring this up in a KDE SIG meeting, but I'm fairly sure it will be shot down. (I definitely DON'T want to replace Apper with a GNOME app!) I understand, and that's fine, if apper is as powerful (in terms of search, primarily) as software-center. Likewise, replacing gnome-packagekit must be brought up with the GNOME and PackageKit maintainers. Well, the main PackageKit maintainer (upstream and for fedora) seems to be Richard Hughes, and given he was the one to first propose infrastructure for an app installer (and the plan was to replace gpk-application with a new app written from scratch), I don't think he'll be against this. Giovanni signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Fri, Dec 02, 2011 at 09:39:31PM +0100, Giovanni Campagna wrote: packagedb seems an interesting project, for storing ratings and reviews, and it could be a candidate to replace the Ubuntu backend. Is there some documentation somewhere? Does it provide some webservice API (REST, JSON, SOAP, anything) It does. Many of the URLs that you can use to view information in a web browser will return the equivalent information as JSON data. Not all of the URLs are fast enough for what you may want to do with them now, though -- we may want to craft some custom methods that give you the information you need faster or in bulk. Another option for some of the things is to have users enter it into the packagedb but to export it via the repodata. This was done for the tag information for instance. From reading one of Richard's review request bugs, it looks like people wished to do the same thing with icons but there were possible legal problems with that approach (the legal problem seemed to cover distributing the icons in either the repodata or a package :-( ) so you'd probably need to pioneer a different approach here. There's also a good chance that we'll encounter some pieces of data that a software center would like to use but that we aren't storing or making public at the moment. If it's already present in the packages or something that users would contribute we can look into how to make that available for the software center to use. This will take coding time, however, so it would be something that you (or whoever is interested in working on backend support for the software center) would need to be willing to sink some time into. -Toshio pgpEXptagMlvY.pgp Description: PGP signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Seeing enough positive feedback on this (and seeing that after all, it works pretty well on my machine), I started an official Fedora 17 feature. You can find it at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SoftwareCenter Comments of course welcome, before I move this on to be ready for wrangler. Giovanni signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On 25 November 2011 23:31, Rex Dieter rdie...@math.unl.edu wrote: These? app-install (and friends) still pending review it seems, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488962 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488968 If the objections truly have been dropped, I'd be happy to help move this along. I got burned by the whole process. I got zero help from anyone in the fedora infrastructure team, and was asked to change the format of the data twice, and was asked to make the generation tools use less RAM, then less CPU, then told that there was not enough disk IO to generate the rawhide daily metadata. I'm still happy to generate the appstream-compatible data and write a trivial UI for this (or to fork and port ubuntu-app-install) but Fedora infrastructure either needs to want to host this on the servers and do the work integrating it into the compose tools, or it needs to accept that we ship a package full of cached data like I've been suggesting all along, and like Ubuntu have been doing for over 5 years. Actually doing the work is pretty easy, but I've not got the energy to fight for the application data in Fedora anymore. Richard. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 02:23:31PM +, Richard Hughes wrote: On 25 November 2011 23:31, Rex Dieter rdie...@math.unl.edu wrote: These? app-install (and friends) still pending review it seems, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488962 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488968 If the objections truly have been dropped, I'd be happy to help move this along. I got burned by the whole process. I got zero help from anyone in the fedora infrastructure team, Funny... I remember talking to you on multiple occassions, letting you know what pkgdb currently was storing in this area, what it could store if the code showed up, and the two people who had worked on that portion of pkgdb code in the past that you should talk to. Perhaps you're forgetting all of that since you ran into some stumbling block past that stage. Looking at your list of gripes and the review request, I'd also note that while you seem to be blaming Fedora Infrastructure for all your woes, you've actually been talking to at least three separate groups that have had input on the matter. Fedora Releng and Fedora Legal seem to be the other two groups whose concerns needed addressing. -Toshio pgpU7E03Bms85.pgp Description: PGP signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On 11/28/2011 05:09 AM, Rahul Sundaram wrote: On 11/28/2011 01:39 AM, Bernd Stramm wrote: It is useful to point out that the space requirements are significant. You would want an implementation that does _not_ store all this information on installed systems. Separate the advertising part from the packaging part. Make the advertising part available for users that want to see it, and keep it out of the systems that want to avoid bloat. Other distributions have working implementations. You can look at what they do and learn directly from it. Rahul While reading through this thread, I cannot get out of mind the first element of Fedora's mission reads: The Fedora Project always strives to lead, not follow. -- Simon Lukasik -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 9:46 AM, Simon Lukasik isim...@fedoraproject.org wrote: On 11/28/2011 05:09 AM, Rahul Sundaram wrote: On 11/28/2011 01:39 AM, Bernd Stramm wrote: It is useful to point out that the space requirements are significant. You would want an implementation that does _not_ store all this information on installed systems. Separate the advertising part from the packaging part. Make the advertising part available for users that want to see it, and keep it out of the systems that want to avoid bloat. Other distributions have working implementations. You can look at what they do and learn directly from it. Rahul While reading through this thread, I cannot get out of mind the first element of Fedora's mission reads: The Fedora Project always strives to lead, not follow. Well it is not like it is the first time this has been brought up. While we keep having discussions about it other distros have just done it. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 09:46:59AM +0100, Simon Lukasik wrote: On 11/28/2011 05:09 AM, Rahul Sundaram wrote: On 11/28/2011 01:39 AM, Bernd Stramm wrote: It is useful to point out that the space requirements are significant. You would want an implementation that does _not_ store all this information on installed systems. Separate the advertising part from the packaging part. Make the advertising part available for users that want to see it, and keep it out of the systems that want to avoid bloat. Other distributions have working implementations. You can look at what they do and learn directly from it. Rahul While reading through this thread, I cannot get out of mind the first element of Fedora's mission reads: The Fedora Project always strives to lead, not follow. At the same time Fedora's mission isn't about cultivating NIH syndrome. People interested in App Store would better check the results of other distros work, instead of duplicating the work. -- Tomasz TorczFuneral in the morning, IDE hacking xmpp: zdzich...@chrome.plin the afternoon and evening. - Alan Cox -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Giovanni Campagna wrote: Well, I'm happy to see that some spec files are translated. In fact, I found out some packages have translations, but those are only visible from yum, not PackageKit (no matter how you insist). That's odd. gpk-application displays them to me. Björn Persson signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On 11/25/2011 06:18 PM, drago01 wrote: On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 12:16 AM, Brendan Jones brendan.jones...@gmail.com wrote: On 11/26/2011 12:03 AM, Giovanni Campagna wrote: 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. Are we in a race? Not sure what you are trying to say ... but the current situation simply sucks from a users pov. We should focus on fixing it. I agree with others, we shouldn't copy the solution from other distro's. However I also agree that there's a common underlying usability feature here: New Fedora and/or Linux users not making the leap between installing applications and installing packages (not that they're 1:1 anyway). In the interest of constructively addressing basic new user usability, here's an idea- How about a package (installed by default) that enabled the display of all Fedora-provided GUI app. ICONS in the menu, installed or not. Then, if a user clicks an application that's not installed, pop up the package installer with the set of required packages pre-selected. i.e. analogous to the missing-binary command-line package installer functionality. Perhaps there are other alternative ideas that could solve the underlying usability issue? -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Mon, 2011-11-28 at 08:09 -0500, Chris Evich wrote: On 11/25/2011 06:18 PM, drago01 wrote: On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 12:16 AM, Brendan Jones brendan.jones...@gmail.com wrote: On 11/26/2011 12:03 AM, Giovanni Campagna wrote: 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. Are we in a race? Not sure what you are trying to say ... but the current situation simply sucks from a users pov. We should focus on fixing it. I agree with others, we shouldn't copy the solution from other distro's. Why not? Others copy us all the time when we do the right thing. Blindly copying others is certainly not a good idea, but when others are being better than us (and from what I saw, the Ubuntu Software Center is way ahead of what we have), there's nothing wrong with adopting what they did. After all, sharing the work is one of the reasons why we make Free Software. :) However I also agree that there's a common underlying usability feature here: New Fedora and/or Linux users not making the leap between installing applications and installing packages (not that they're 1:1 anyway). In the interest of constructively addressing basic new user usability, here's an idea- How about a package (installed by default) that enabled the display of all Fedora-provided GUI app. ICONS in the menu, installed or not. $ repoquery --file \*.desktop | wc -l 2609 Assuming there is only one application (.desktop file) in each of those (which is probably a lower estimation), having 2600 entries available at all time in a menu doesn't seem like a good idea to me. -- Mathieu -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
- Original Message - From: Giovanni Campagna scampa.giova...@gmail.com To: devel@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 -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Sun, 27 Nov 2011 02:26:44 +0100, Jan Kratochvil wrote: (3) He is not going to wait for installation of new games to try them. He wants to just click and run the game - like he does with Flash games, immediately. I have no problem running there: yum --setopt 'group_package_types=optional, default, mandatory' --skip-broken group install 'Games and Entertainment' But the same problem of choosing favorite apps with preview screenshot etc. needs to be solved in some app launcher, not in an app installer. Currently after such yum installation you have just mess in the Games menu. Regards, Jan -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Il giorno dom, 27/11/2011 alle 02.06 +0100, Björn Persson ha scritto: Gregory Maxwell wrote: Can someone help me understand whats being asked for here? I can only guess that I'm not the only person confused by this thread. Icons. The only thing I can see that Giovanni has mentioned that Packagekit doesn't provide is icons. Presumably he wants each application's own icon to be displayed in the list of available applications. Packagekit seems to display those only for installed packages, which is understandable as it would otherwise have to download all the packages and extract the icons. Not just icons. We also need translations (that are in .desktop files but not in .spec files), we need screenshots, we need reviews, we need ratings. All things that a package manager (yum or packagekit) cannot provide, by itself, but software-center already supports. Giovanni signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Il giorno dom, 27/11/2011 alle 03.08 -0500, Aleksandar Kurtakov ha scritto: [...] 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). I know, and I understand why the yum developers rejected the package approach, back in 2009. That's why I'm proposing to do the dirty work of generating and including app-stream.xml and app-icons.tar.gz in the repodata. 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. I really hope so. Giovanni signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Il giorno sab, 26/11/2011 alle 10.05 +0530, Rahul Sundaram ha scritto: On 11/26/2011 04:33 AM, Giovanni Campagna wrote: 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 You want to start here http://alex.eftimie.ro/2011/08/22/packagekit-backend-for-software-center-pencils-down-report/ It should work in Fedora but of course needs testing and packaging. I knew about that, and that's in fact what I'm starting from, although the big problem is obtaining the metadata, not showing it. Giovanni signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Il giorno ven, 25/11/2011 alle 17.31 -0600, Rex Dieter ha scritto: Giovanni Campagna wrote: 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. These? app-install (and friends) still pending review it seems, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488962 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488968 If the objections truly have been dropped, I'd be happy to help move this along. The fedora-app-install review was brought to FESCo (https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/469), which agreed to ship the package, but then nothing happened. In any case, those packages are obsolete, as they use an old sqlite based format, instead of the new one (xml + xapian). Giovanni signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On 11/27/2011 07:01 AM, Reindl Harald wrote: well, if people who not going to read any textes are the primary target of a operationg system this world is going down Welcome to the real world. Rahul -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Am 27.11.2011 14:31, schrieb Rahul Sundaram: On 11/27/2011 07:01 AM, Reindl Harald wrote: well, if people who not going to read any textes are the primary target of a operationg system this world is going down Welcome to the real world. i know and it is sad enough as it is now but is it really the right way to support this more than needed and give all the lern-resistent peopole the feeling the are on the right way? the world where we live currently was built from people who pulled on their brain, was thankful that they can read and learn - i am currently 34 years old and fear if the wrong direction of the last years will be enforced more and more all knowledge will faster go down than it was invited make things as easy as you can but not easier as needed signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Am 27.11.2011 16:01, schrieb Reindl Harald: Am 27.11.2011 14:31, schrieb Rahul Sundaram: On 11/27/2011 07:01 AM, Reindl Harald wrote: well, if people who not going to read any textes are the primary target of a operationg system this world is going down Welcome to the real world. i know and it is sad enough as it is now but is it really the right way to support this more than needed and give all the lern-resistent peopole the feeling the are on the right way? the world where we live currently was built from people who pulled on their brain, was thankful that they can read and learn - i am currently 34 years old and fear if the wrong direction of the last years will be enforced more and more all knowledge will faster go down than it was invited make things as easy as you can but not easier as needed And a software center is IMHO walking in the wrong direction. The packagemanagement system is Linux biggest advantage for normal users. The right way should be making packaging as easy as possible so every vendor could ship packages for their linux software. Maybe some kind of meta specfile that could be used for build rpm *and* deb packages and some common standards for packaging would be more effective. Regrads, Heiko -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Il giorno dom, 27/11/2011 alle 16.18 +0100, Heiko Adams ha scritto: Am 27.11.2011 16:01, schrieb Reindl Harald: Am 27.11.2011 14:31, schrieb Rahul Sundaram: On 11/27/2011 07:01 AM, Reindl Harald wrote: well, if people who not going to read any textes are the primary target of a operationg system this world is going down Welcome to the real world. i know and it is sad enough as it is now but is it really the right way to support this more than needed and give all the lern-resistent peopole the feeling the are on the right way? the world where we live currently was built from people who pulled on their brain, was thankful that they can read and learn - i am currently 34 years old and fear if the wrong direction of the last years will be enforced more and more all knowledge will faster go down than it was invited make things as easy as you can but not easier as needed And a software center is IMHO walking in the wrong direction. The packagemanagement system is Linux biggest advantage for normal users. The right way should be making packaging as easy as possible so every vendor could ship packages for their linux software. Maybe some kind of meta specfile that could be used for build rpm *and* deb packages and some common standards for packaging would be more effective. Ahem... I don't see you would contrast this with the package management. As said earlier, the software center is a new and shiny way to present the same old stuff (packagekit, yum, rpm), focusing on apps, icons, screenshots, rather than package names and dependecies, but still doing the same hard work. Giovanni signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On 11/27/2011 08:31 PM, Reindl Harald wrote: Am 27.11.2011 14:31, schrieb Rahul Sundaram: On 11/27/2011 07:01 AM, Reindl Harald wrote: well, if people who not going to read any textes are the primary target of a operationg system this world is going down Welcome to the real world. i know and it is sad enough as it is now but is it really the right way to support this more than needed and give all the lern-resistent peopole the feeling the are on the right way? Learn resistant? don't be elitist. Computers are tools. Making things easier for busy people or the non-hackers is part of making free and open source software useful for everyone. There is zero reasons not to make things more user friendly. I would love to have good suggestions for applications. The people who love to learn more already have other tools to use like yum on the command line. Rahul -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On 11/27/2011 08:48 PM, Heiko Adams wrote: And a software center is IMHO walking in the wrong direction. The packagemanagement system is Linux biggest advantage for normal users. Do you understand that software centre is just a UI on top of the package manager + additional metadata like screenshots and ratings? I don't think so Rahul -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Sun, 27 Nov 2011 21:00:45 +0530 Rahul Sundaram methe...@gmail.com wrote: On 11/27/2011 08:31 PM, Reindl Harald wrote: Am 27.11.2011 14:31, schrieb Rahul Sundaram: On 11/27/2011 07:01 AM, Reindl Harald wrote: well, if people who not going to read any textes are the primary target of a operationg system this world is going down Welcome to the real world. i know and it is sad enough as it is now but is it really the right way to support this more than needed and give all the lern-resistent peopole the feeling the are on the right way? Learn resistant? don't be elitist. Computers are tools. Making things easier for busy people or the non-hackers is part of making free and open source software useful for everyone. I think this is going a little far. Saying that people are better off being able to read is not elitist. And like or not, we who make tools are doing a part of building the world. Should we try to make it better, or simple more convenient? Computers are tools, and using them the wrong way can cause a lot of damage. The most convenient interface for the lazy is not always the best. -- Bernd Stramm bernd.str...@gmail.com -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On 11/27/2011 09:20 PM, Bernd Stramm wrote: I think this is going a little far. Saying that people are better off being able to read is not elitist. Yes it is. Because you are assuming that it is because people have trouble reading. I can read just fine but I would love to have screenshots for games. Whats wrong with that? And like or not, we who make tools are doing a part of building the world. Should we try to make it better, or simple more convenient? Why not do both? Additional metadata which is useful is a no brainer to add. Rahul -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Giovanni Campagna wrote: We also need translations (that are in .desktop files but not in .spec files), Looky here, a spec file with translations: http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=mine_detector.git;a=blob;f=mine_detector.spec;h=294bcf4148789afb1ba7bb7b11971e231e001061;hb=master Making lots of translators co-maintainers of all packages just to let them translate the spec files wouldn't scale of course, but there also exist translated package descriptions which do not originate from the spec files – even for packages without desktop files. At least some Swedish translations exist; I don't know about Italian. I can't tell you exactly how those translations are produced and distributed, but someone who works with translations presumably could. we need screenshots, we need reviews, we need ratings. OK, then I'm starting to understand what you want. You might want to find a better term for that than application installer, as it apparently does a lot more than just install applications. How much new server infrastructure do you think would be needed? Is a hierarchy of FTP mirrors with a round-trip time of a day or two satisfactory for distributing reviews and ratings? Björn Persson signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 02:06:51AM +0100, Björn Persson wrote: Gregory Maxwell wrote: Can someone help me understand whats being asked for here? I can only guess that I'm not the only person confused by this thread. Icons. The only thing I can see that Giovanni has mentioned that Packagekit doesn't provide is icons. Presumably he wants each application's own icon to be displayed in the list of available applications. Packagekit seems to display those only for installed packages, which is understandable as it would otherwise have to download all the packages and extract the icons. Being devil's advocate here, it's not just icons. If you have a look at something like the Android Marketplace[1] you'll see there are: - app summaries - contributed reviews - scores-out-of-5 - an indication of how many people downloaded each program - top apps in various categories (however that is calculated) - a good search engine This reveals another flaw in this plan which is for this software centre to be effective, it's going to require full time management to filter out spammy reviews, optimize the search engine, classify apps into logical groups, and to pick apps for top tables. Rich. [1] https://market.android.com/?hl=en -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Sun, 27 Nov 2011 22:06:33 +0530 Rahul Sundaram methe...@gmail.com wrote: On 11/27/2011 09:20 PM, Bernd Stramm wrote: I think this is going a little far. Saying that people are better off being able to read is not elitist. Yes it is. Because you are assuming that it is because people have trouble reading. I can read just fine but I would love to have screenshots for games. Whats wrong with that? Call me elitist then, I think it is better when more people can read, and when they actually do it. If implemented the wrong way, what's wrong with screenshots is bloat. I don't want my system to store screenshots for 30,000 packages that I haven't installed, just because some people like screenshots. And like or not, we who make tools are doing a part of building the world. Should we try to make it better, or simple more convenient? Why not do both? Additional metadata which is useful is a no brainer to add. Structurally simple perhaps. But there is overhead for the fedora project to consider, and overhead in the installed systems. It would be better to add more convenience for one type of user without inconveniencing other types of users, and without making it harder to make packages. -- Bernd Stramm bernd.str...@gmail.com -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On 11/28/2011 12:01 AM, Bernd Stramm wrote: Call me elitist then, I think it is better when more people can read, and when they actually do it. Unfortunately for someone talking about so much about the important of reading, you don't seem to be reading about the proposal much. Its not limited to screenshots. Popularity of packages, reviews, suggestions, list of top apps ... we are talking a lot of additional useful information that will be of benefit to a lot more users. If implemented the wrong way, what's wrong with screenshots is bloat. If implemented wrong, everything can be wrong. That's just a truism and not a useful review of any proposal. If you are going to be critical, you need to put more effort on being constructive. Rahul -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Il giorno dom, 27/11/2011 alle 18.47 +0100, Björn Persson ha scritto: Giovanni Campagna wrote: We also need translations (that are in .desktop files but not in .spec files), Looky here, a spec file with translations: http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=mine_detector.git;a=blob;f=mine_detector.spec;h=294bcf4148789afb1ba7bb7b11971e231e001061;hb=master Making lots of translators co-maintainers of all packages just to let them translate the spec files wouldn't scale of course, but there also exist translated package descriptions which do not originate from the spec files – even for packages without desktop files. At least some Swedish translations exist; I don't know about Italian. I can't tell you exactly how those translations are produced and distributed, but someone who works with translations presumably could. Well, I'm happy to see that some spec files are translated. In fact, I found out some packages have translations, but those are only visible from yum, not PackageKit (no matter how you insist). In any case, I would consider spec files as somehow complementary to desktop files. As you point out in an other mail, we currently don't have good user visible titles in rpm metadata, but for most of our packages this is not an issue, as most of the users should not even notice their existance. On the other hand, a .desktop file has the property that the very same file, when the package is installed, will end up in /usr/share/applications and thus in the app launcher (gnome-shell, kmenu). This means that the categories exposed in the .desktop file actually reflect the position of the application as installed, that the name and the command are exactly the same, etc. Also, it becomes possible to have multiple applications in the same package, without the user knowing that one app is part of a bigger collection. we need screenshots, we need reviews, we need ratings. OK, then I'm starting to understand what you want. You might want to find a better term for that than application installer, as it apparently does a lot more than just install applications. Ubuntu settled with Software Center, and explicitly says translations should not use the equivalent of Application Center in the guidelines. We could do the same, although for the GNOME case we may want to keep Add/Remove packages (gpk-application), even if shipping the software-center, because, as the implementations stands, packages without a .desktop files are not shown. (The KDE case is different, as apper handles both app search and package search) How much new server infrastructure do you think would be needed? Is a hierarchy of FTP mirrors with a round-trip time of a day or two satisfactory for distributing reviews and ratings? Tricky question. There are various services here to consider: 1) repo metadata. I've prepared a small python script that explodes rpm and generates suitable appdata.xml and app-icons.tar.gz. Once built, they can be distributed like every other .xml file in repodata. Since appdata.xml is the primary source of information for software-center (even before primary.xml), it must always be in sync with mirrors (otherwise it may try to download non existing packages) 2) rating/reviews. I don't know exactly what infrastructure Ubuntu uses, but it seems to be a single server with django; maybe it's possible to get away without mirroring. In any case, the rating/review API is RESTful but requires special knowledge in the server; FTP or HTTP alone are not enough. (debian has reviews disabled, opensuse uses ubuntu's infrastructure) 3) we need screenshots. Currently all the three distros use the same servers (shared between debian and ubuntu); this is going to be a large amount of data (on avg., 4 large jpgs per app), so perhaps we could agree with the other distro and use the same imgs. This said, if screenshots are stale for a bunch of days (or weeks, even), I wouldn't care. Giovanni PS: to be honest, there is a 4th item in the list: a server for accepting app store payments. I don't think this would be appropriate for Fedora, at least now. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On 11/27/2011 04:47 PM, Giovanni Campagna wrote: I knew about that, and that's in fact what I'm starting from, although the big problem is obtaining the metadata, not showing it. So, the next logical question would be, how does openSUSE solve this? Rahul -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Mon, 28 Nov 2011 01:09:46 +0530 Rahul Sundaram methe...@gmail.com wrote: On 11/28/2011 12:01 AM, Bernd Stramm wrote: Call me elitist then, I think it is better when more people can read, and when they actually do it. Unfortunately for someone talking about so much about the important of reading, you don't seem to be reading about the proposal much. Its not limited to screenshots. I know that, no need to be insulting. Popularity of packages, reviews, suggestions, list of top apps ... we are talking a lot of additional useful information that will be of benefit to a lot more users. Yes useful indeed, and a fair bit of advertising information at the same time. This can be big when used by a lot of packages. If implemented the wrong way, what's wrong with screenshots is bloat. If implemented wrong, everything can be wrong. That's just a truism and not a useful review of any proposal. It is useful to point out that the space requirements are significant. You would want an implementation that does _not_ store all this information on installed systems. Separate the advertising part from the packaging part. Make the advertising part available for users that want to see it, and keep it out of the systems that want to avoid bloat. -- Bernd Stramm bernd.str...@gmail.com -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:19:21 +0100 Giovanni Campagna scampa.giova...@gmail.com wrote: The fedora-app-install review was brought to FESCo (https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/469), which agreed to ship the package, but then nothing happened. Just to be clear, FESCo agreed that the package could be shipped. ;) Nothing is getting in without a review... but yeah, I suspect we may want to wait and see what more folks who have been away from their machines over this long weekend say in the next few days. I know there was a rpm app setup being discussed, as well as something the yum maintainers worked up, as well as something using pkgdb. It would be nice to get everyone interested talking and map out a way forward. kevin signature.asc Description: PGP signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 4:14 PM, Bernd Stramm bernd.str...@gmail.com wrote: Removing the screenshots, icons, popularity vote results etc etc post-install is not a good solution. These things should be available when someone wants to look at them, not installed by default. The mechanisms to look at them should be there unless removed, but not the advertising for several thousand packages. Since the install can't happen unless you're online— why not load these screenshots over the network on demand? I was just making fun of an ubuntu desktop install the other day: No NFS client but 100 mbytes of icons. None of these decisions exist in a vacuum— if fedora is to include many megabytes of screenshots in the default install then thats a great many applications which can't be installed. For many simple programs a good high resolution screenshot of the program will be similar in size to the program. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 02:06:51AM +0100, Björn Persson wrote: Gregory Maxwell wrote: Can someone help me understand whats being asked for here? I can only guess that I'm not the only person confused by this thread. Icons. The only thing I can see that Giovanni has mentioned that Packagekit doesn't provide is icons. Presumably he wants each application's own icon to be displayed in the list of available applications. Packagekit seems to display those only for installed packages, which is understandable as it would otherwise have to download all the packages and extract the icons. Being devil's advocate here, it's not just icons. If you have a look at something like the Android Marketplace[1] you'll see there are: - app summaries - contributed reviews - scores-out-of-5 - an indication of how many people downloaded each program - top apps in various categories (however that is calculated) - a good search engine Another cool feature I think would be integration with our other fedora infrastructure (bugs, updates-testing feedback). 1) So you can see a list of bugs affecting a package at the time of installing 2) Also to get more people involved in testing updates you could set your self as a tester of a package and get notified of bugs fixes to a package. Basically an easier interface to A Glorious Vision of Our Shared Update Feedback Future -Angus This reveals another flaw in this plan which is for this software centre to be effective, it's going to require full time management to filter out spammy reviews, optimize the search engine, classify apps into logical groups, and to pick apps for top tables. Rich. [1] https://market.android.com/?hl=en -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On 11/28/2011 01:39 AM, Bernd Stramm wrote: It is useful to point out that the space requirements are significant. You would want an implementation that does _not_ store all this information on installed systems. Separate the advertising part from the packaging part. Make the advertising part available for users that want to see it, and keep it out of the systems that want to avoid bloat. Other distributions have working implementations. You can look at what they do and learn directly from it. Rahul -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On 25/11/11 23:24, Heiko Adams wrote: Would you jump from a building too if ubuntu guys are doing? In other words: copying every idea - no matter how stupid - just because ubuntu is doing it, doesn't bring any benifit to fedora IMHO. Or do we already have unity as primary desktop too, like ubuntu? Something shouldn't be rejected out of hand. Because someone used it first. But on it's pros\cons to this project. -- Regards, Frank Murphy UTF_8 Encoded Friend of fedoraproject.org -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Il giorno sab, 26/11/2011 alle 01.27 +0100, Florian Müllner ha scritto: While I agree that our app-install story sucks, I'm far less convinced that we need yet-another-downstream solution. This is not really a downstream solution. Since OpenSuse GSoC 2011, software-center can interact with PackageKit, in addition to ubuntu's apt daemon, which makes it almost cross platform. Also, the new appstream (replacing app-install) database format was developed as the cross-distro meeting in january. The only downstream parts are about generating the data from repositories and distributing it in every Fedora installation. As long as we don't have shared repos (or even a common naming policy, package manager, or package format), this is a downstream problem. Giovanni signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Am 26.11.2011 00:03, schrieb Giovanni Campagna: 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 Maybe you're looking for http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/AppStream ? I'm sure they could need some help, the project looks promising to me. Regards, Julian -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk7Q6MYACgkQHW4w++5ByCHS6ACgr5bGPpnD2+rOTORp0ORpYPIH YBYAoIgXsIH0UuNFOQiPKtt+XQ67b7Qp =oSI6 -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Am 26.11.2011 00:28, schrieb Giovanni Campagna: Or you have any reason to say that this is idea is stupid? the biggest benefit of a linux-distribution is a consistent package-managment with straight dependencies and centralized repos, if you mean a additionak GUI for this - fine if we speak about crap installing applications outside the rpm-database it would be the worst idea anybody can have signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On 11/26/2011 05:07 AM, Reindl Harald wrote: Am 26.11.2011 00:28, schrieb Giovanni Campagna: Or you have any reason to say that this is idea is stupid? the biggest benefit of a linux-distribution is a consistent package-managment with straight dependencies and centralized repos, if you mean a additionak GUI for this - fine Yes if we speak about crap installing applications outside the rpm-database it would be the worst idea anybody can have Nobody is talking about that. Installing applications outside the db does happen in the real world for various reasons however. Bundles, installers and so on. Rahul -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Reindl Harald wrote: the biggest benefit of a linux-distribution is a consistent package-managment with straight dependencies and centralized repos, if you mean a additionak GUI for this - fine if we speak about crap installing applications outside the rpm-database it would be the worst idea anybody can have Wholehearted +1! Kevin Kofler -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Laurin lin...@fedoraproject.org wrote: I totally agree with you, a software center would be a really nice idea, also for more experienced user because they can browse easily through the available software and may find something interesting. I am really confused by this thread. Here is what my F14 laptop has: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/packagekit.png It can be configured to only show end-user graphical applications and to hide subpackages, via the filters dialog though this isn't the default (and I don't think it should be— unless a way of turning off the filters is made more discoverable). This thread was mentioned on IRC and I asked about it because I couldn't understand it. I wasn't able to get an explanation I found acceptable... One thing that was suggested is that a software center would only show graphical end user apps, and would hide libraries and sub-packages. But, as I point out, the software in Fedora can already do this. It was also suggested that a software center would highlight or promote typical tools that an average person would need— I'm skip the rant about Fedora's myopic definitions of an average person, and focus on typical: If there is a application which most average users will need— why isn't it in the default desktop install? Can someone help me understand whats being asked for here? I can only guess that I'm not the only person confused by this thread. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Giovanni Campagna wrote: 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. We do have translations of the fields that it's meaningful to translate – summary and description – and the translations are displayed by RPM, Yum and Packagekit. (Of course all the translations need to be written by someone, and that work isn't complete.) One thing that we surprisingly don't have is titles on the packages. With title I mean the name of the program or library as it would be written in normal English prose with English grammar taken into account. An application installer GUI for nontechnical users should display the title of each application, but it's currently impossible to write an algorithm to find out the title of a Fedora package. The package name is a technical name that often contains structure showing how the package is related to other packages. It's restricted to English letters, digits and a selected few other characters. The name is often an abbreviation of the title witten in all lowercase, whereas the title should be written in title case and may contain spaces, apostrophes, accents et cetera. I think it makes sense to write the full title in the summary field, together with a very short description showing what the package is used for. Some packages have this, but many others have only a generic description in this field. For GUI applications it may make sense for the application installer to look in the desktop file, but not all packages have a desktop file, and even when they do it doesn't always contain the title. In some cases only the description field contains the full title. This field is meant for a somewhat long description that you wouldn't want to display in a list of packages, and programmatically extracting the title from the text is unreliable. A few case studies: Name: Zim Summary: Desktop wiki notekeeper Description: Zim is a WYSIWYG text editor written in PyGTK [...] zim.desktop: Name=Zim Desktop Wiki zim.desktop: Comment=Edit text files wiki style zim.desktop: GenericName=Text Editor Here the package name is the title, in title case even. The summary shows what the program is for. This may seem like the best way to do it, but the problem is that not all packages can use their title for their package name. The desktop file makes it look like the full title is Zim Desktop Wiki, which I don't think is what the author of Zim intended. Name: totem Summary: Movie player for GNOME Description: Totem is simple movie player for the GNOME desktop. [...] totem.desktop: Name=Movie Player totem.desktop: Comment=Play movies and songs The package name is the title in lowercase. Only the description contains the title capitalized. The summary and the desktop file describe what the program does, but are completely unhelpful to users who care about which video player they use. The best way to get the title would be to take the package name and convert it to title case. Name: angrydd Summary: Falling blocks game Description: In Angry, Drunken Dwarves (ADD), you are an angry, [...] fedora-angrydd.desktop: Name=Angry Drunken Dwarves This title contains spaces and a comma, so the package name is an abbreviation of the title. The summary is very generic. The description contains the full title, but there's another word before it so an attempt to take the beginning of the description to get the title would fail. The desktop file contains the title except for the comma. Name: alex4 Summary: Alex the Allegator 4 - Platform game Description: In the latest installment of the series Alex travels [...] fedora-alex4.desktop: Name=Alex the Allegator 4 fedora-alex4.desktop: Comment=Old school platform game Again, the package name is an abbreviation of the title. The summary contains the full title and also shows what the program does. This summary is all that is needed in a list of packages. Displaying both the name and the comment from the desktop file would also work. The description does not contain the title. Name: zile Summary: Zile Is Lossy Emacs Description: Zile is a small Emacs clone. [...] Regardless of whether Zile Is Lossy Emacs or just Zile should be considered the full title, this summary contains the title and also describes fairly well what the program does. At least anyone who might possibly want to use it will get an idea of what it is. Displaying only the summary in a list would be quite sufficient. There is no desktop file. As you can see, there's no one field that always contains the title, and there's no way a program can try them one at a time to arrive at the best choice. This is in my opinion the most important thing to improve when it comes to package management. Björn Persson signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
Re: A software center for Fedora
Gregory Maxwell wrote: Can someone help me understand whats being asked for here? I can only guess that I'm not the only person confused by this thread. Icons. The only thing I can see that Giovanni has mentioned that Packagekit doesn't provide is icons. Presumably he wants each application's own icon to be displayed in the list of available applications. Packagekit seems to display those only for installed packages, which is understandable as it would otherwise have to download all the packages and extract the icons. Other than that, perhaps he just likes the user interface of Software Center better. Björn Persson signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Sat, 26 Nov 2011 23:40:58 +0100, Gregory Maxwell wrote: Here is what my F14 laptop has: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/packagekit.png It can be configured to only show end-user graphical applications That's not enough. I use my grandfather unaffected by prior MS-Windows experience as a real user tester. gpk-application is a no go for him. (1) There are hundreds/thousands games, how to choose those he may like? There is no popularity / favorite games choice. There is no single-click demo / preview of the game. Software Center seems to address this (Our star apps / Top Rated). When I forced him trying once (F14 Gnome2) installing some games he told me those games he tried were just stupid. (1b) He is not going to read ANY texts to decide which game to choose. (1b2) Those texts are only in English; but it does not matter in fact. (2) Even after he installs the game he cannot run it. It just creates some menu item entry but he never enters the menus. Moreover there are tens of already installed games in the menu so he cannot find the new one there (I also could not find it as they were unsorted and vertically scolling). He can run only those he has _icon_ on the desktop for. Each new installed application should create a new _icon_ on the desktop. As a result he uses Fedora only as a launcher of Flash games as the web Flash catalogs have Top Rated games listed there and the games are just easily accessible there - one clicks the Top Rated entry and the game runs. Plus he runs those games I installed there myself and created for them an icon on his desktop. Fedora is missing some real end user testing, if it tried to targets the end users. Thanks, Jan -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Am 27.11.2011 02:26, schrieb Jan Kratochvil: On Sat, 26 Nov 2011 23:40:58 +0100, Gregory Maxwell wrote: Here is what my F14 laptop has: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/packagekit.png It can be configured to only show end-user graphical applications That's not enough. I use my grandfather unaffected by prior MS-Windows experience as a real user tester. gpk-application is a no go for him. (1) There are hundreds/thousands games, how to choose those he may like? There is no popularity / favorite games choice. There is no single-click demo / preview of the game. Software Center seems to address this (Our star apps / Top Rated). When I forced him trying once (F14 Gnome2) installing some games he told me those games he tried were just stupid. (1b) He is not going to read ANY texts to decide which game to choose. (1b2) Those texts are only in English; but it does not matter in fact. well, if people who not going to read any textes are the primary target of a operationg system this world is going down young people seems not learning to read at all, older one are too lazy - soory but if this is the world we live in the future something goes terrible wrong! signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On 11/26/2011 12:03 AM, Giovanni Campagna wrote: 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. Are we in a race? -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 12:16 AM, Brendan Jones brendan.jones...@gmail.com wrote: On 11/26/2011 12:03 AM, Giovanni Campagna wrote: 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. Are we in a race? Not sure what you are trying to say ... but the current situation simply sucks from a users pov. We should focus on fixing it. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 Am 26.11.2011 00:18, schrieb drago01: On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 12:16 AM, Brendan Jones brendan.jones...@gmail.com wrote: On 11/26/2011 12:03 AM, Giovanni Campagna wrote: 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. Are we in a race? Not sure what you are trying to say ... but the current situation simply sucks from a users pov. We should focus on fixing it. Would you jump from a building too if ubuntu guys are doing? In other words: copying every idea - no matter how stupid - just because ubuntu is doing it, doesn't bring any benifit to fedora IMHO. Or do we already have unity as primary desktop too, like ubuntu? Regrads, Heiko -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iF4EAREIAAYFAk7QI6IACgkQ/zGbOvPHkcLUZAD/QozYcerq/Cq+1W2arpprbEPW GkD/DwXp/8hAlp/+UVAA/3glgrjxnEwUuTbt5ml708aOcDh/p3c55Rfr4D4X5Krf =PWGC -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
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. I totally agree with you, a software center would be a really nice idea, also for more experienced user because they can browse easily through the available software and may find something interesting. Regards -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Il giorno sab, 26/11/2011 alle 00.24 +0100, Heiko Adams ha scritto: Am 26.11.2011 00:18, schrieb drago01: On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 12:16 AM, Brendan Jones brendan.jones...@gmail.com wrote: On 11/26/2011 12:03 AM, Giovanni Campagna wrote: 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. Are we in a race? Not sure what you are trying to say ... but the current situation simply sucks from a users pov. We should focus on fixing it. Would you jump from a building too if ubuntu guys are doing? In other words: copying every idea - no matter how stupid - just because ubuntu is doing it, doesn't bring any benifit to fedora IMHO. Or do we already have unity as primary desktop too, like ubuntu? I think no one is implying that we should have a software center just because Ubuntu has one. What I meant is that they have it, we don't, and we need it because it's an application installer, and it has a nice and easy to use UI (better that gpk-application, at least). Or you have any reason to say that this is idea is stupid? Giovanni signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Giovanni Campagna wrote: 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. These? app-install (and friends) still pending review it seems, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488962 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488968 If the objections truly have been dropped, I'd be happy to help move this along. -- rex -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Giovanni Campagna wrote: 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. Apper would support app-installer just fine if it were packaged. Kevin Kofler -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
While I agree that our app-install story sucks, I'm far less convinced that we need yet-another-downstream solution. Florian -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
Florian Müllner wrote: While I agree that our app-install story sucks, I'm far less convinced that we need yet-another-downstream solution. We indeed don't need one, Apper has all the required support upstream, we just need to get it in. (That's in fact one of the reasons why it got renamed from KPackageKit to Apper.) I don't know whether gnome-packagekit already has the required stuff, but if it doesn't, adding it (upstream!) shouldn't be hard. Kevin Kofler -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: A software center for Fedora
On 11/26/2011 04:33 AM, Giovanni Campagna wrote: 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 You want to start here http://alex.eftimie.ro/2011/08/22/packagekit-backend-for-software-center-pencils-down-report/ It should work in Fedora but of course needs testing and packaging. Rahul -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
