[packagekit] gpk-application user interaction (but stuck with Fedora...)

[Tim Sarbin]

On Mon, 2009-08-10 at 10:33 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> 2009/8/9 Anders F Björklund <afb at algonet.se>:
> > I think this (packages vs. applications) was mentioned earlier:
> > http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2009/03/05/application-installing/
> 
> Yes, this was what I was working on a few months ago. Note, it works,
> packages have been built, and the feature is complete, but was
> rejected by key people in the Fedora project, and thus got canned. It
> would have got us an application installer, and we could have worked
> with other distros rolling out new functionality. Alas, it was not to
> be. Until somebody either talks to the Fedora infrastructure people on
> my behalf and convinces them to allow the packages into the repos, or
> does the feature in a way acceptable to Fedora, then I'm not going to
> be pushing this. I've been burnt trying to push this functionality
> into Fedora.

Great, of course Fedora would be resistant to this but I'm sure they
have their reasons.

> 
> The review for the trivial app-install component is here:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488962 but all the
> discussion for the fedora parts are here:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488968
> 
> > Whether it would make for a "basic/advance" toggle or for separate
> > applications (X-app-install/X-packagekit) altogether, I don't know.
> 
> Yes, I think a new mode for advanced/basic (defaulting to basic) would
> be quite easy to do.

>From what I can tell all of the information we need is already there. It
would basically boil down to filtering applications that have a Menu
parameter. For example, the "GNU Image Manipulation Program" has a menu
property, whereas "Interactive tool for working with large images" does
not. If we have some sort of way of enumerating packages with menus we
could easily build this screen. I know some distros have their own
"Application Install" utilities, but isn't the whole point of PackageKit
to unify these types of programs?