Day: March 26, 2014

So I did a bit more hacking on PackageKit, appstream-glib and gnome-software last night. We’ve now got screenshots from Debian (which are not very good) and long application descriptions from the package descriptions (which are also not very good). It works well enough now, although you now need PackageKit from master as well as appstream-glib and gnome-software.

This is my last day of hacking on the Ubuntu version, but I’m hopeful other people can take what I’ve done and continue to polish the application so it works as well as it does on Fedora. Tasks left to do include:

• Get aptcc to honour the DOWNLOADED filter flag so we can show applications in the ‘Updates’ pane
• Get aptcc to respect the APPLICATION filter to speed up getting the installed list by an order of magnitude
• Get gnome-software (or appstream-glib) to use the system stock icons rather than the shitty ones shipped in the app-install-data package
• Find out a way to load localized names and descriptions from the app-install-data gettext archive and add support to appstream-glib. You’ll likely need to call dgettext(), bindtextdomain() and bind_textdomain_codeset()
• Find out a way how to populate the ‘quality’ stars in gnome-software, which might actually mean adding more data to the app-install desktop files. This is kind of data we need.
• Find out why aptcc sometimes includes the package summary in the licence detail position
• Improve the package details to human readable code to save bullet points and convert to a UTF-8 dot
• Get the systemd offline-updates code working, which is completely untested
• Find out why aptcc seems to use a SHA1 hash for the repo name (e.g. pkcon repo-list)
• Find out why aptcc does not set the data part of the package-id to be prefixed with installed: for installed packages

If you can help with any of this, please grab me on #PackageKit on freenode.