[packagekit] Application Installer Miniconf: Trip Report

[Matthias Klumpp]

Hi!
This is very cool stuff! (Could become the biggest cross-distro
collaboration ever!)
Currently watching parts of the video :) Many thanks for your summary!
As I'm not so familiar with the XDG collaboration process: How can I
comment the specs or propose changes? Where are the new specs published? Is
this already "accepted" by the major distributions?

And one detail question: Does this mean App-Install will be dropped, as
the Xapian DB will take its place?
Kid regards
  Matthias


On Mon, 24 Jan 2011 13:38:20 +0000, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com>
wrote:
> For three days last week I attended a conference on application
> installing in Germany, hosted by Vincent Untz and the other guys from
> Suse.
> 
> There were experts sent from Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, and
> Mandriva. From Fedora both I and Florian Festi attended.
> 
> The idea of the conference was to talk about defining some APIs we can
> share, to discuss interchange formats, and talking to the UI designers
> to make installing and removing software on Linux suck less.
> 
> Overview:
> 
>  • Lots of progress, people were willing to help solve a common
> problem in a unified way.
>  • The right people were at the meeting and we came up with a really
> good technical plan with action items.
>  • Ubuntu have a nice UI with the Ubuntu Software Center.
>  • Packages are not that interesting to the end user.
>  • We will integrate with online social services to provide features
> like ratings and comments using OCS
>  • We will produce appdata.xml metadata per-repository, rather than
> one super-package.
>  • We will use a xapian index to query the desktop metadata,
> rebuilding as repos are added / removed.
>  • Will add several new optional fields to desktop file specification
>  upstream.
>  • Non .desktop files as applications *do* make sense, e.g. firefox
> plugins as .xpi or Chromium style web links. This makes sense to push
> to OCS, rather than in the distro metadata.
> 
> What this means for PackageKit:
> 
>  • We download this in PackageKit if a repo is enabled or refreshed,
> which we can achieve with a PackageKit script plugin.
> 
> We've put a few detailed documents with architecture plan here:
> http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/AppStream and Vincent has
> also uploaded all the notes from the meeting to the same location.
> 
> For more information still, there was a presentation we gave at the
> end of the conference, and can be viewed here:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHeP2ZBwS_U -- it's nearly an hour and
> gets pretty technical, so get coffee before if you click the video.
> 
> Comments and questions welcomed, thanks.
> 
> Richard
> _______________________________________________
> PackageKit mailing list
> PackageKit at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/packagekit