In the Linux desktop we have a very big problem: We focus very much on packages. Packages are interesting to programmers, but users care about applications.
I’ll explain the difference:
- Packages can contain none, one or multiple applications. Packages are called “openoffice-common”
- Applications only belong to one package. Applications are called “OpenOffice.org Writer”
Now, when a user wants to install an application, they have to research on Google what the package name is called (which is different on each distro) or hope that the application name is mentioned in the description of the package in the distro metadata. Not ideal at all.
Now, I said as a desktop we have one big problem, well, we actually have two: We don’t all speak English well. Some of us speak no English at all.
We want to be able to display package descriptions to the user in all languages, but we don’t want to download 80x the metadata to do so. Most packaging systems only understand en_US anyway, and there certainly isn’t the resources to translate every spec file or emerge instruction for each distro. To add to the problems, each package needs an icon, in various sizes so we can show the application icon rather than a generic box.
So we’re sunk, right?
No. In each package, there are desktop files that contain all the applications, with nice translations gently massaged and QA’d by upstream. It would be nice if we could search on that data. At the moment, this is impossible, unless we want to download every package in the archive, and extract the data from it. This is sort of how Ubuntu does gnome-app-install, and it seems to work fairly well. It is Ubuntu specific, but maybe we could work on that.
So, we cache all the desktop files, and push this out to the repo metadata?
No. If you did that you make a lot of people very unhappy, as even compressed the metadata and icons make up over 80Mb.
So we’re sunk, right?
No. What we can do is create sub-packages for each repo (e.g. rpmfusion-appdata) which ships a tarball of icons and a few hundred Kb of SQL. Every time the repo maintainer can be bothered (once a month?) the new data is generated, and a new package pushed out to the mirrors. If the repo maintainer can’t be bothered to do that, then none of the new packages will show up in the application browser. It’s optional.
This data clogs up my system right?
Well, it’s only a few tens of Mb if you want all the icons in most of the sizes, if you only choose the 48×48 option then it’s much less. When you install the new $repo-appdata subpackage, it removes all the stale applications and re-adds the latest data. This happens in the vendor spec files as postinst scripts.
How do I query the data?
It’s a simple sqlite database in /var/lib/app-install/desktop.db — the icons are located in /usr/share/app-install/icons/$size/*.png — there’s no GUI installer yet using this, but expect a few before two long.
Great! Another Ubuntu v.s. Red Hat standards war!
No. Roderick Greening, Sebastian Heinlein and myself together drafted the specification together, and made it generic enough for all the distros to use. It’s totally expected that each distro will code a different tool to extract the metadata, but that’s because they are different in some important ways.
So the maintainers have to install everything just to get the desktop files?!
No. You can download and install a package to a prefix without the deps — we don’t need the binary to run, we just need the data. in this way we don’t need to download -data subpackages, only the one with the desktop file in.
Can I add some more features to the spec?
Yes, in a little while. We want to get version 1 of the spec finished, with it being used in a few distros. When we’re comfortable this works correctly, we’ll start working on version 2, and add stuff like popularity metrics and metadata about suggesting gnome-power-manager rather than kpowersave if you’re running GNOME. There are lots of things we need to add for this to work really well.
So, Comments?