Drop Ubuntu Software Centre and Adopt GNOME Software

On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 08:13:39PM +0300, Amr Ibrahim wrote: > Dear developers, > > USC is getting old. It is in Python 2, and probably will never be ported to Python 3. > > I suggest dropping USC in future Ubuntu releases and adopt GNOME Software. > > GNOME Software is build on newer GNOME technologies. It, of course, needs some modifications to support the same features which are supported by USC, like purchasing applications. I think some work on a port was undertaken a while ago, but stalled because not all dependencies were ported. So it might not be a big job to pick that up and move USC to Python 3. It is fair to say that the software centre hasn't seen much feature development in recent times. I agree that it would be interesting for us to look into adopting GNOME Software in future. I've not looked at it much myself but it seems as if it would provide a nice user experience. There would be some problems to solve first though - off the top of my head they include - How to provide Appstream/DEP-11 metadata (what's the status of this in Debian? How's our coverage?) - Ratings and Reviews - do we need to support them? If so, that will need to be added. - Purchasing. Do we still want a way to purchase things? What about people who already did so on previous releases - how can we keep giving them access to their goodies? - Smaller tweaks like adding installed programs (with desktop files) to the launcher, UI changes for Unity, … Just my views. I don't know what the rest of the desktop team thinks, but I'd be keen to at least investigate the possibility of doing this, unless we decide to dust USC off. Cheers, -- Iain Lane [ iain at orangesquash.org.uk ] Debian Developer [ laney at debian.org ] Ubuntu Developer [ laney at ubuntu.com ] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 819 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/attachments/20150731/03925c45/attachment.pgp>