Experiment: an RPM that shows uninstalled apps in main menu

Denis Leroy denis at poolshark.org
Mon Jan 21 17:18:36 UTC 2008


Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Denis Leroy (denis at poolshark.org) said: 
>> For kicks and giggles, I hacked up a proof-of-concept RPM here for F-8 :
>>
>> http://www.poolshark.org/src/fedora-apps-0.1-1.fc8.i386.rpm
>>
>> After installation, you'll have to restart the gnome-panel with a quick 
>> 'killall gnome-panel'. The rpm is 5 MB, which is not bad for almost 1000 
>> apps (remember we're only talking about GUI apps here, i.e. apps that 
>> install a desktop file).
> 
> Interesting idea. You're setting yourself up for a lot of pain on the
> package maintenance side, I fear.

Well that all depends on how much scripting I'm prepared to make :-)

I used a number of scripts to extract the desktop and icon files out of 
the RPMs, parse the desktop files, etc... in theory it's 100% 
scriptable. Now, things would be considerably easier if this was 
integrated into packagedb: flag packages that have desktop entries, add 
information such as short description and icon. Then we could push the 
idea further and add things such as screenshots, for example. Then we'd 
have all the raw data necessary to create a real "fedora software 
installation assistant".

There are some challenges to providing this through a regular package 
review though: may need collaboration with redhat-menus (integration 
into main menu) and/or desktop-utils owners (to update list of 
uninstalled apps after an RPM is installed manually).




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