Day: August 30, 2007

Application database icons

When pk-application gets packages that meet a search criteria it just prints the package name, version, summary and if it's installed or not. This is really bad from a UI point of view.

What I want is:

__________
[        ]  packagename-version
[  ICON  ]  Translated short description
[________]     [more]

Unfortunately, neither the translated short description nor the icon is present in a rpm or deb. This seems odd to me, as in Windows world an installer package gets to choose its own icon, although I appreciate there is usually a loader involved.

gnome-app-install hardcodes everything to ubuntu package naming and iterates on a mirror of the ubuntu servers picking out desktop files. This isn't ideal as it's ubuntu specific and requires quite a bit of manual fixing up and package specific checks. But it looks good.

So we have several solutions to this problem:

  1. Modify every packaging system to return a translated package name and icon for each package in the repo.
  2. Maintain a separate packagekit-data package which is just full of icon files and translated .desktop files, and a per-distro common_name->package_name database.
  3. Don't display an icon for the package and only show the icon of the group type.

Option 1 would require massive code changes in all the packaging formats and isn't really an option.
Option 2 is a never-ending-story and there would be a massive workload to keep the database up to date and the translations fresh. There would need to be some sort of web interface to keep everything updated without a deluge of patches.
Option 3 is what I'm doing now, but looks completely amateur compared to gnome-app-install.

So, ideas?