Talk:Features/SoftwareCenter

Please note that we plan to announce a powerful package search API for Fedora Packages at FUDCon North America 2012 (Blacksburg) that uses Xapien, and our intent was to provide the backend capability for network enabled fast & intelligent searching with useful results. This work would fit in nicely with this feature, and we will be demoing it at that point in time.


 * Thu Dec 01 2011 Tom Callaway 

I have a few comments about this:
 * There's an error in the Summary: There is no kpackagekit in Fedora ≥ 16, it's called Apper now.
 * Apper already supports application installation if the required metadata is provided, so we need no new "software center" on the KDE spin (nor on any other KDE-based spin, such as that Scientific KDE live DVD), we'd just need that feature enabled in Apper. This should be clarified in the feature page. The Software Center would be only a replacement for or an alternative to gnome-packagekit, Apper need not and should not be replaced.
 * Is there really no support in gnome-packagekit or any other existing GTK+-based native PackageKit frontend for an application view? Do we really need Ubuntu's Software Center (with that PackageKit backend added more or less as an afterthought)? I haven't seen this particular objection addressed in the mailing list discussion.

--Kkofler 23:42, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

PS: If you want to know how Kubuntu is handling this: They provide 2 options:
 * Muon (their current default), which is apt-only and thus not suitable for us. (1. it hasn't been ported to apt-rpm and 2. FESCo voted against allowing GUIs installed by default to use different depsolvers than the command-line default, so we couldn't use it even if somebody got it to work with apt-rpm.)
 * Apper, which is already what we ship, and which supports that "Software Center" functionality already. (We just need the PackageKit-side support packaged, then we can enable the functionality in Apper.)

--Kkofler 19:34, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

gpk-application is the only Gtk frontend to PackageKit (packaged in Fedora, looking from repoquery --whatrequires PackageKit and PackageKit-glib). Putting application support in gpk-application would mean reimplementing software-center - in a tougher language.

Even if software-center's code is a bit biased on the apt side, it works (here and now!) pretty well with PackageKit, and it's really nice to nice - no comparison with gpk-application.

--Gcampax 22:52, 2 December 2011 (UTC)