[IAEP] [Marketing] Users cannot find Sugar with gnome-software in Fedora 20

[Peter Robinson]

>> >> > Richard Hughes, the owner of Fedora's Changes/AppInstaller [2], put out
>> >> > a call [3] for maintainers to ship an AppData specification [4], so that
>> >> > Software will find "registered" apps.
>> >> >
>> >> > I asked Richard how I could help fix this and this is from his reply.
>> >> >
>> >> >          [quote]
>> >> >          I assume you want to show the sugar-runner application.
>> >> >          According to
>> >> >          https://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/screenshots/f21/failed.html#sugar-runner.desktop it's missing a Comment in the .desktop file that means we just can't show it in the search results. It's also missing an AppData file, so a long description and some screenshots.
>> >> >
>> >> >          If you fix up the .desktop file, and/or add an AppData file that
>> >> >          validates, then do a build+update for f21 then it should
>> >> >          re-appear in the search results after a couple of days.
>> >> >
>> >> >          Hope this helps,
>> >> >
>> >> >          Richard
>> >> >          [/quote]
>> >> >
>> >> > Is anyone already working on this?
>> >> >
>> >> > Iain Brown Douglas
>> >> I tried to get sugar and sugar-runner added to the gnome-software app a
>> >> while ago and was told definitively in GIMPNet #fedora-desktop that it
>> >> was not going to happen. Good luck; I would really like to see this happen.
>> >
>> > I thought, too, that this is unlikely.
>>
>> Thomas is exactly correct here.
>>
>> > GNOME Software Center has ambitions to automagically find "Applications"
>> > - and  only packagers have to be concerned with packages and
>> > dependencies, not users, my understanding.
>> >
>> > A quick search of the groups listed by
>> > yum grouplist
>> > suggests that Libre Office is the only current "group" to be found by
>> > Software.
>> >
>> > Thus Sugar would be leading the way if we succeed!
>>
>> Not exactly, it's not particularly hard to do. We basically just need
>> a dependency package which contains nothing but the app data and a set
>> of dependencies for all the bits we need installed to work. Basically
>> a simple package that would equate to the @sugar-desktop group.
>> Possibly something like "sugar-runner-desktop" or similar.
>>
>> > When I write an AppData specification [4] for Sugar, what will it be
>> > registered to?
>>
>> It doesn't register, there a number of things that happen, extra data
>> is added to the Fedora repositories which then gets indexed by the
>> AppData parser
>>
>> > Something which PackageKit can recognise as equal to
>> >
>> > yum groupinstall @sugar-desktop sugar-runner
>> >
>> > But is it doable?
>>
>> It should be quite straight forward. If someone will provide me the
>> patch for the AppData plus appropriate screenshots etc I'll do the
>> packaging side of things and it should be easy enough to land in
>> Fedora 21+
>>
> That is excellent news, Peter, thank you for explaining the detail.
>
> Speaking only as a documentation monkey ...
>
> The new app you describe sounds like a sugar-loader.

No, it's more sugar-runner plus Activities included.

> Regarding naming, I am being a bit of a pedant here, but I always
> thought "desktop" does not fit the Sugar metaphor well.

Whatever! Can't bring myself to care that much what it's called as
long as there's a general consensus about the colour of the bike shed.

> If we can fix a name for this new app, I will rename, and resubmit
>
> sugar3.appdata.xml
>
> with a view to generating the required patch.
>
> Thinking of non-GNOME users, will the yum groupinstall method, co-exist
> with the "new" (gnome-only-centred) app?

Yes, one does not obsolete the other.

> ... or will the app become the default method to, also, set up
> sugar-session outside of GNOME?
>
> gnome-software documentation asks us not to involve users with package
> information! - in the Software interface, do we have an interest in
> *one* element only to select Sugar, or more-than-one?

The yum group method is needed for other things such as the live cd
creation, as for documentation it's likely useful to keep both
documentation around with the gnome-software option being the primary.

Peter