[Mageia-discuss] Fwd: Results of the App Installer Meeting

Wed Jan 26 14:19:21 CET 2011

+Hi, 
+
+Here is the mail Vincent Untz just sent to distributions at lists.freedesktop.org 
+about the results of the cross-distributions Nürnberg meeting.
+
+Cheers.
+
+Samuel Verschelde
+
+----------  Message transmis  ----------
+
+Sujet : Results of the App Installer Meeting
+Date : mercredi 26 janvier 2011
+De : Vincent Untz
+À : distributions at lists.freedesktop.org
+
+
+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
+distributions at 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
+Distributions at lists.freedesktop.org
+http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/distributions
+
+
+-------------------------------------------------------
+
+