Introducing AppStream, Multi-Distro App Framework

[Thatguy]

Will this solve the problem that people have creating installers for all the different distros, for instance Blizzard has cited that fragmentation makes it too costly to port their games to Linux? If it doesn't solve those problems, then was anything truly great really accomplished, except to reduce needed development hours spent on it so it can be spent elsewhere? If it does then that would be truly spectacular.

NO, it simply allows the same douche baggy development packaging to continue that cuased game ports to not come over to linux.

[madjr]

They should had started on this 5 years ago, but damn, finally.

[ennael]

Mageia not Mandriva

Great project indeed. Just as an information, Mageia was there not Mandriva. It was one of the main goals of Mageia team to develop cross distro collaboration and we hope we will have plenty of others.

[ssam]

didn't click'n'run solve all of this in 2007?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNR_%28software%29

you could put the CNR client on many distros, upstreams only had to do packaging once and it could handle foss, freeware and paid-for apps.

my personal solution would be something that could install packages (maybe debs) into a nice sandbox in $HOME. I know it would not work for everything, but for most desktop apps it would be fine.

[89c51]

excellent direction

now we need to "develop" a single package/tool/format/protocol/whatever that will allow us to do something like

Appstream> Install App > Play without underlying complexity of layers upon layers

[mat69]

Uhm If I understood the article correctly this is nothing special. It is mostly about the GUI (!) i.e. for the application devs nothing changes at all.

[plonoma]

I see great potential and exciting possibilities if they widen the scope a bit.

The great thing about a package manager is that you don't have to use only centralized package repositories.
Many things have their own ppa.


It would be awesome if AppStream would contain some api's for packages/software management.
It would make a lot of people's life much easier.

API's for:
1) setting up ppa's or AppStream's equivalent.
2) That can handle stuff like versions, branching(forks), multiple sources, statistics.

What would really be handy is that there would be something like public statistics.
Statistics literaly available for everybody. It doesn't have to be detailed or mandatory. e.g. number of downloads for a certain time interval. Filterable by OS, distro, package/software version, source, other...
Such statistics would be available by software sources such as AppStream Equivalent of PPA's.

If enough website's would uniformly implement something like this. We could have something to could the total number of downloaded linux distro's or other floss-software somewhat reliably.
This part wouldn't even have to be limited to Linux.

It would need api's for:
installing packages/software
package/software sources
updating packages/software via packages and managers
package/software statistics



It would also be nice to be able to do the following:
setup AppStream on a server and some computers
be able to set the computers to fetch the software they should install from the server
be able to set a package/software configuration of a bundle of packages you want on the computers. And share that via network. All computers connected would be able to copy, check and add/remove the right packages. While the server uses another configuration for it's own software. It would be handy to make a configuration and include that in another configuration.

[plonoma]

Such api's would allow for a uniform way to do things one way and have it work everywhere.
That's the kind of stuff that makes developers life easier.



Wasn't KDE working on a frontend for such a thing called Shaman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacman_...age_manager%29

[mirv]

Hmm, I don't think this is meant as any sort of replacement to current package maintenance systems, but rather more like an easy interface to them for an end user. I can see it gaining traction in point-and-click adventure desktop experiences, while still letting those who wish use the underlying mechanism (so the gentoo folk might not want to use it, but the ubuntu crowd might like it).

Something to keep an eye on at any rate, and see if it pans out.

[sirdilznik]

I was mildly excited reading this until I read the dreaded word "PackageKit". There's a reason I stay away from PackageKit like the plague and just use yum from cli (actually I'd probably use yum anyway even if PackageKit didn't bring up really bad memories because there are some things I just prefer doing from cli even if there is an excellent GUI). Then again I haven't actually given PackageKit a shot in a really long time so maybe it's not horrible anymore.