AppStream Ideas and Thoughts

[Jos Poortvliet]

On 2011-02-14 Matthias wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> On Mon, 14 Feb 2011 16:18:55 -0200, Jos Poortvliet
<snip>
> Neither Listaller nor AppTool want to replace DEB/RPM, it's just an
> extension, like Klik was. All these tools interact somehow with the native
> package management to fetch dependencies etc. and make 3rd-party apps
> usable.
> The "unified package format" does not mean Fedora using DEB or Debian
> using RPM, it means all distributions sharing one file format to distribute
> 3rd-party apps, which includes FLOSS projects as well as proprietary
> software like Google Earth, World of Goo or Angry Birds. I really hate the
> binary installers of Google Earth etc., but if proprietary software
> developers publish tarballs containibg statically-linked apps, it is not
> really easy for ordinary end-users to get it working properly (and
> integrating it into the system cannot be done with dirty, insecure tricks).
> Also, ordinary end-users cannot do anything with a tarball containing just
> sources they should "compile" to make an application working.

Now I might be mistaken and I know it might be fighting windmills but I 
thought 'we' (= FOSS community) didn't like to make it too easy for users to 
install stuff from outside the safe distro repositories? For security, 
stability and performance reasons? In other words, a cross-distro packaging 
format means - what is the value of distributions, how can we share libraries, 
how do we guarantee security updates in dependencies, stuff like that starts 
biting. Isn't THAT the problem with cross-distro, always-working app 
installers like Klik?

> > Appstream with it's GUI's (a Qt and a GTK one) and it's libraries like
> > libattica, packagekit, Xapian etc all aim to use existing distro
> > infrastructure. That's actually the strength of going with packagekit
> 
> I contribute to PackageKit as well as developing Listaller - they're
> completely different, but make use of each other and interact, to provide
> secure 3rd-party software installations. (in theory :D The PK<->LI
> connection is not yet finished, and the sandboxing stuff not even started
> yet)
> Btw: Are there already GUIs in progress? (SC for GTK+, okay. But what is
> done with Qt?)

About 6 months before Appstream was thought of at the openSUSE conference last 
October, Project Bretzn was started to - well, do this and more. Bretzn has a 
wider scope - yet smaller, mostly more practical. They use OBS to build rpms 
and debs for the major distro's, to mention one way they use to cut corners. 

They worke on OCS, use Libattica etc - and with the dude who started it, Frank 
Karlitschek, being a KDE dude, decided to first build a KDE client. They 
actually also already started a library so they could build a GTK client but 
it was decided by Appstream to build on SC so Bretzn dropped that.

Yes, Appstream and Bretzn should work more together, I know. I've been trying 
to get them to work on this ML instead of their own.
<snip>
> As far as I can see, the infrastructure is built step-by-step (otherwise
> it would not really make sense :P), the 3rd-party-app distribution stuff
> would be the very last step :)

Ok, fine if it doesn't slow anything down :P

> Kind regards
>    Matthias
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