I spent a couple of days last week in Brno talking about the future of package (and application) management in Fedora. Things we discussed:

We currently don’t cater for desktop users by showing details about the packaging layer (GPG keys, packages, etc) and not being able to search while we install/remove

We need a centralized application store to stay competitive with other distros and OSs

Our metadata and package mirroring policies hurt end users not using the command line

I presented (and demoed) gnome-software with its plugin architecture that would allow us to switch to using packages and blobs like glick and listaller

blobs like glick and listaller I made the case for application metadata, so we can get things like localised application details, screenshots and ratings using a few different methods

Some interesting points came up, and this is approximately 30 hours of talking condensed into a few bullet points:

YUM upstream will soon be considered deprecated, and we will move into a DNF/hawkey/librepo-based future. This includes PackageKit. I’m going to be building a hawkey based backend with help from the maintainer, and he is is aware of what PK does and any unusual tasks that are performance critical.

We should keep old versions of metadata on the server to stop metadata refresh explosions happening where yesterdays primary gets updated because a transaction only has todays filelists installed. This will significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth used by the metadata updates.

We should keep old versions of packages on the mirrors, to avoid the case where we depsolve fine, get 404 on the package download and then have to re-download MD, depsolve, etc. YUM apparently has issues with multiple versions of a package being present in the metadata, so we should probably only reference the latest packages in the MD (which also keeps the MD to sane size).

We should ship the per-arch solv files in the repo MD. This avoids SAT solutions like libsolv from spending 20 seconds+ per repo rebuilding .solv files from sqlite or xml metadata, and allows us to kill the dnf cron job

We should teach rpm to update it’s own SAT database, which we can do with an RPM plugin.

We want a software center, and fedora-tagger can provide the ratings/comments information. We might need an OCS server for screenshots, or can tie in screenshots with automated QA somehow.

We are going to teach koji about appstream data, so a simple extract script (to be written by me) can produce a .tar file of icons and a .xml file of translated descriptions at the end of each koji build

We are going to teach the compose tools to xmlmerge all the appstream .xml files and ship as appstream.xml

We are going to teach the compose tools to join all the tar files and ship as appstream-data.tar.gz

We are going to investigate the use of meta-desktop files to install a super-set of applications, e.g. KDE, or “Python developer” which allows for screenshots, ratings and all that stuff.

It was an interesting couple of days, and quite a few people will be ping’ed over the next few days to make some of what we discussed a reality. I’m convinced the changes we can make here will give us a slick and featureful application installer, something that can really be an asset for Fedora and RHEL. Comments, as always, welcome.