Application Installing (II)

I’ve been hacking more on the app-install framework. It’s now an independent project, with a tarball here.

What do the tools do?

$ app-install-create: creates the initial database, only used in the post section of the app-install package
$ app-install-add: adds data to the system database, used in repo packages
$ app-install-remove: removes data from the system database, used in repo packages
$ app-install-generate: generates the data for a desktop file, used when generating data from the distro helper

Now, the latter file is designed to be called from a distro specific helper, so for yum we do something like this:

$ app-install-generate-yum.py –repo=rawhide –dist=./dist

This downloads all the rawhide packages that ship a desktop file, uncompress them, and extract the data from the desktop files. There’s a cache, so repeated runs of this don’t have to re-download all the data. This tool takes about 10 minutes to run when the download has completed.

This tools creates ./dist/rawhide-icons.tar.gz and ./dist/rawhide.sqldata which are designed to be shipped in a distro package file.

In a package file, for instance, fedora-app-install, the post action would be something like:

$ app-install-add –repo=fedora –source=/var/lib/app-install/rawhide.sqldata

and in the preun:

$ app-install-remove –repo=fedora

I’m inviting other distros to submit distro generate tools, and I’ll ship them in the tarball.