As promised in my previous mail, here is what I find that's lacking in Fedora, compared to the direct competition (Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSuse), and recently even some proprietary systems: we don't have an application installer. While we do have two nice UIs (gpk-application and apper) for package management, having to deal with packages, with no icons and no translations is not appropriate for end users. Instead, I think it would be appriopriate to follow the Ubuntu path and recognize the applications from .desktop files, because that is what will end up in the app launcher. Since this is free software, we already have a complete software center available, straight from launchpad.net/software-center. (Actually, it doesn't yet work on Fedora, partly because of unmet dependencies, but those are just technical bugs, and I don't think it would be difficult to have something running soon) What is missing, though, is the data, representing the applications available in fedora repositories. Long long ago (march 2009), a package was proposed for inclusion, which contained application data, in a format understood by software-center, for fedora at that time. This package was initially rejected, then one year later FESCo ruled that it did not actually break packaging guidelines, yet it disappeared. Back to present, it's almost 2012. I'm here and I want to do whatever is required, at all layers, to ensure that application data is correctly generated, updated, and downloaded, at all times and for all users. This may involve changes in our repository infrastructure, in yum, packagekit and maybe in other places as well. I think this is specifically a Fedora feature, as it involves the whole distribution and touches many groups at the same time, which explains why I proposed it here instead of anywhere else. If you think it's worth it, I'd like to propose it as an official Fedora 17 Feature, and I'll happily write the wiki page. I hope that some people from the relevant group will point me to the right place (perhaps starting from what happened to fedora-app-install...), and I hope you like the idea in general. Giovanni
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