AppStream Ideas and Thoughts

[James Rhodes]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:52 PM, Éric Araujo <merwok at netwok.org> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Le 16/02/2011 11:39, James Rhodes a écrit :
>> Not trying to be disrespectful in anyway; that's just honestly what I
>> see when I install and use a distribution, compared to say building my
>> own using Linux From Scratch (in addition, the latter does not have an
>> implicit package management supplied).
>>
>> By all means, please enlighten me on the other work that goes into
>> distributions.  If anything it'll give me a clearer view of the
>> situation.
>
> Not anyone is willing and able of building their OS from scattered
> components.  Some years ago, I wanted to use a good OS made from free
> software: I found such a thing in the Debian project.  I use it because
> I don’t have the time nor skill to do all that the Debian developers do
> for me:

No I certainly didn't mean to imply that everyone is capable or wants
to build their own OS from scratch.  The point of AppTools is about
making it easier for users to find and install software after all.

> - make sure each package is free software;

This can be easily seen from the package installation window?

> - test and debug packages;

Obviously this sort of thing is a responsibility of the software
developer.  In the event that a package is broken, or doesn't work, a
maintainer is not going to actually start looking at code, debugging
it themselves and fixing it.  They're just going to go "it doesn't
work throw it away", which is perfectly fine.  But I'd like it (from
an end user point of view) if I could still install that package if I
wanted.

> - make sure each package is integrated with the system (configuration in
> /etc, basic doc in /usr/share/doc, man pages);

This is one of the issues I'm having to tackle with AppTools, and to
be perfectly honest, it's not something I've really thought about that
much.  I could implement some sort of path mapping system by which a
distribution can say "map this path to here instead of where ever you
were going to put it".  Mostly I'm assuming that there won't be large
differences in the filesystem layout (everyone has /etc for example,
it's part of the Linux standard).

> - make sure packages work with each other;

It's up to the developer of the software to pick the right version of
the libraries that he's relying on, not the distribution maintainer.

> - react quickly to upstream security patches;

Your maintainer isn't going to get a fix before the developer releases
it, so this is a non-issue.

Regards, James.