[AppStream] [GSOC] Integrating AppRecommender with AppStream

[Matthias Klumpp]

2016-05-03 23:14 GMT+02:00 Lucas Moura <lucas.moura128 at gmail.com>:
> Hello,
>
> My name is Lucas Moura and I am Google Summer of Code Student working for
> the Debian project. My summer project is related to AppRecommender, a Debian
> package recommender system:
>
> https://github.com/TCC-AppRecommender/AppRecommender
>
> This application works by creating an user profile based on the user
> installed packages, this profile is basically the most significant terms on
> all user packages. With this profile built, AppRecommender uses Xapian to
> query for Debian packages and display the closest ones with the query.
>
> Currently, this application can only be used via terminal access. However,
> my gsoc project is to change that, and allow AppRecommender to be integrated
> into graphical package managers:
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2016/StudentApplications/LucasMoura
>
> I have already discussed about this idea on the PackageKit thread, but since
> this approach is now related to AppStream, It is best to change for the
> appropriate mailing list. The original thread can be seen on:
>
> https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/packagekit/2016-April/026411.html
>
> In that thread, I have proposed the idea of creating a lib that would use
> AppRecommender as a backend application, and the lib would just be an API to
> the application. However, Mr. Matthias Klumpp and Mr. Richard Hughes raised
> some concerns over this approach, specially considering the speed from C >
> python > C translation and the difficulties of maintaining a new library.
>
> One proposed approach was to implement the algorithm directly on one of the
> libappstream projects. Although this can be done, I am just afraid of having
> to maintain the same code on different projects.This would be a problem if I
> decide to change one of the recommendation algorithms, since the algorithm
> would need to change on two different places and in two distinct languages.
>
> However, upon reading AppStream docs more carefully, I think my original
> approach was really flawed. Now, I think that instead of calling directly
> AppRecommender from the lib, the new function on libappstream would just
> read the content generated by AppRecommender, that should be able to provide
> its recommendations as a valid XML format for AppStream. Therefore, what I
> could add to libappstream is way to manage recommendations. Therefore any
> recommender system that wants to be integrated with AppStream would just
> need to generate a proper recommendation file and place it in an specific
> place, so libappstream can read it and manage it.

That actually sounds like a solid plan :-)

> I think that this approach would not add any new dependencies on
> libappstream. But I would like to ask if that is a good approach to follow,
> or maybe the path is really to implement the recommendation strategies
> directly into libappstream.

This should work easily, some details would be needed on what the new
metadata YAML or XML format would look like (adding it to the
AppStream data would only work server-side in a safe way).

Btw, I think you've meant to send this mail to appstream at lists.fd.o,
so I added it to CC.

Cheers,
    Matthias