[Mageia-discuss] a cross-distribution meeting about software installers

Samuel Verschelde stormi at laposte.net
Sat Jan 8 23:16:00 CET 2011


Hi,

Vincent Untz from Novell, who works on openSuse, invited us (and contributers 
from other distributions, including Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu) to participate 
in a meeting about software installers and the end-user experience.

Here is how Vincent presents the project :

----- Quote ----- 
*** Goals ***

Blue-sky goals:
    * agree on a common UI to install applications
    * agree on what metadata to use, how to generate it, where to host it
    * agree on a protocol to use to provide non-static metadata (featured 
apps, ratings, comments, etc.)
    * decide what metadata can be shared between distros, and what should stay 
distro-specific (eg: do we want user comments to be shared?) 

In reality, if it turns out we can't all agree on one item, it's still fine: it 
doesn't mean we can't collaborate on the other items. And some distros might 
still work together.

It's worth mentioning here that what matters to us is the end-user experience. 
It matters more than the technical implementation.

*** Background ***

Nearly all distributions are slowly moving towards making it easier to deal 
with applications, and get information about those. The Ubuntu Software Center 
is a good example of work being done here.

At the moment, many of us are working in our own corners, while we could 
certainly all move much faster if we worked together, especially since we're 
all targetting mostly the same result.

We do want content to be provided not just by us, distributors, but also by 
the users: their experience with an application can inspire other users to 
install it too. 
The goals of this meeting is to see what can be put in common and harmonized 
between various distributions, from the end-user point of view.
----- End of quote ----- 

The meeting will occur in Nürnberg, Germany from January 19th to 21st

We don't know yet what the outcome of this 3-days meeting will be, but it may 
be a great opportunity.

For the mageia side, the participants will be :
- Michael Scherer (misc)
- Olivier Thauvin (Nanar), author of Sophie, the cross-distribution RPM 
database,
- Samuel Verschelde (Stormi), for the mageia-app-db project.

Best regards

Samuel Verschelde


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