[packagekit] Application Installer Miniconf: Trip Report

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