> And especially, I'm looking forward to Trisquel's new software center.

I've reviewed various alternative apt frontends.  The only ones that I
liked were apper and mx-package-installer, neither of which is a
suitable replacement for gnome-app-install:

apper does not distinguish between applications and other kinds of
packages, so it is a synaptic alternative rather than a
gnome-app-install alternative, and while I like it, I think that
synaptic is better overall.  Moreover, apper is Qt-based, which would be
fine for Trisquel, but Trisquel Mini avoids Qt in order to keep resource
usage down.

mx-package-installer does distinguish between applications and other
kinds of packages, but via manual curation, which is not the ideal
direction for us I think.  It also seems a little more geared toward
intermediate users.  It's pretty neat, offering a little of what
gnome-app-install does, plus what synaptic does, plus some additional
features.  I think that modifying it to remove all of the
recommendations for non-free crap would be a worthwhile project in
itself, but it would not be a good replacement for gnome-app-install.

Since I did not find a good alternative, I am going to try to fix up and
preserve gnome-app-install.  I have ported it from Gtk2 to Gtk3 and am
now cleaning up as well as fixing some preexisting bugs.  Then I'll port
it from Python 2 to Python 3.  Meanwhile, Ark74 is working on a method
of regenerating the backend data using Trisquel's repositories so that
to replace the four-year-old data that was based on Ubuntu's
repositories at the time.

> I wonder whether I could bring this purified version of software
> manager to Debian.

I see no reason that it wouldn't work with Debian.  The backend data
would just need to be regenerated using Debian's repositories instead of
Trisquel's.

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

Reply via email to