JFYI. Debian has been represented at the meeting by Enrico Zini (who has blogged about various aspects of the meeting as well [1,2,3]) and David Kalnischkies. In the end, quite some pieces of Debian technologies have attracted interest and are on their way to be part of the proposed solution. Well done!
Cheers. [1] http://www.enricozini.org/2011/debian/appinstaller2011/ [2] http://www.enricozini.org/2011/debian/pkgshelf/ [3] http://www.enricozini.org/2011/debian/distromatch/ ----- Forwarded message from Vincent Untz <vu...@gnome.org> ----- Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2011 13:57:41 +0100 From: Vincent Untz <vu...@gnome.org> To: distributi...@lists.freedesktop.org Subject: Results of the App Installer Meeting Hi all, The cross-distro App Installer Meeting that was announced a few weeks ago took place last week. It was a very productive meeting, with people from Debian, Fedora, Mageia, openSUSE and Ubuntu attending. We wanted to see how we can collaborate on the creation of a good user experience for installing applications, and we reached concrete results: we agreed on an architecture to achieve this, with specific technologies to be used. A quick foreword: with this project, the user experience is what matters to us. This means that our approach is application-centric instead of being package-centric. We do not want the end users we target here to have to learn about packages: they already know what an application is, and this is what they actually care about ("I want Inkscape"). It is in no way an attempt to kill packages; on the contrary, we'll build on top of them. But this application-centric focus has several impacts on the design of the architecture, from the user interface to metadata that we want to display to users. Architecture ============ The overall architecture of the project is described at: http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/AppStream/Implementation We aim for getting a working implementation as soon as possible by tying together existing projects. The architecture allows different implementations, though. In particular, there is no reason why other client implementations shouldn't exist or the data shouldn't be accessed by the existing, distribution-specific tools. Here's a very high-level summary: + On the client side: - Use the Ubuntu Software Center as the reference UI (it should be possible to implement other UI since everything is open) - Access apps metadata through xapian - Access additional metadata through OCS (Open Collaboration Services) - Access screenshots, possibly through screenshots.debian.net (using a per-distro proxy) or similar services + On the server side: - Generate apps metadata, based on information coming from upstream .desktop files - Make this metadata (as well as icons and more) available, ideally in the distribution repositories, on the mirrors + Per-distribution work: - The tool to generate the apps metadata will possibly be per-distro - Each distro can decide on some policy wrt OCS: . Use a distro-specific server or not . Display comments/ratings/screenshots from other distros or not . etc. While we do welcome comments, it's worth pointing out that it's easy to get stuck on trying to plan the best architecture ever, and we'll avoid this: this architecture is our plan, and we will implement it :-) Additional architectural bits ============================= There are additional bits that we looked at, but that did not fit into to overall architecture yet. It is our intention to integrate these bits, though. a) Matching packages between distributions This may become handy if we want to share data like screenshots, comments or ratings. The decision to use such data from other distributions should be up to each distribution, but we want to enable this possibility. This has other uses for the contributor communities, like easily browsing patches from other distributions. b) The Debian tagging system (debtags) Tagging applications can help users find the applications they look for. The meeting was too short to think about reaching a full agreement on this, but there was interest in the debtags system. If most distributions are interested in adopting this system, we will integrate debtags into the overall architecture. Where do we go now? =================== To keep us moving, we established a schedule for the development of this project: http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/AppStream/ActionItems Let me quickly summarize the timeline we're targetting (skipping some details from the wiki page): + April: "Publish metadata / Port UI" - Publish app metadata as part of the distros repos - Make this app metadata available via xapian in all distros - Port Ubuntu Software Center to non-Debian-based systems + July: "Integrate non-static metadata" - Setup OCS servers for distros - Use OCS from the Application Center + November: "Deliver to users" - Ship a working Application Center in distros releasing around this time We'll work on this direction, and everybody is welcome to help! Resources ========= mailing list: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/distributions wiki: http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/AppStream git: http://gitorious.org/appstream We decided that for further communication, the distributions mailing list would be the right place because our effort is cross-distributions. If it turns out we're generating too much traffic for distributi...@lists.fd.o, we'll create a new mailing list. We will use the distributions wiki to document our work, and we've already put all the notes from the meeting there. Please keep in mind that those are raw notes and that they might lack context :-) So don't hesitate to ask for clarifications! A project was already created on gitorious to collect various resources. We know this is an important topic, and we believe we'll provide a good solution for it much more easily by working together. So don't hesitate to join the fun! Vincent, on behalf of all the participants to the meeting -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. _______________________________________________ Distributions mailing list distributi...@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/distributions ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7 zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/ Quando anche i santi ti voltano le spalle, | . |. I've fans everywhere ti resta John Fante -- V. Capossela .......| ..: |.......... -- C. Adams
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