packaging: new spec filed idea

[Richard Hughes]

On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 12:22 -0500, Robin Norwood wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 17:49 +0100, Jakub 'Livio' Rusinek wrote:
> > Listen, PackageKit displays unuseful icons in his main package
> > browsing component.
> > Replacing them with appropriate icons from icon theme would be some
> > improvement. 
> 
> Well, FYI, the purpose of that particular column in the UI at the moment
> is 'is the package installed'.  The icons used are pretty bad, and the
> whole UI is very much up for debate.

Totally. I want to do something separate like gnome-app-install that
lets a new user just point and click.

> I agree with you that there would be some value in adding the icons.

Agreed.

> But the implementation is
> non-trivial.  I think the first step would be to get an 'icon' field
> added to the package metadata files that yum uses.  However, if the icon
> field is the actual .png data, that makes the metadata files much
> bigger.

Much, much bigger.

> If the icon field is a name or label, then that label has to
> match something already on the system.  It wouldn't be useful for
> packages that aren't installed yet because the icon data is...in the
> package.

Sure, but we could ship a packagekit-icons package, although that sucks
as it requires constant rebuilding as others have pointed out.

> So, I agree that it would be better, but it's non-trivial to do.

If you are interested solving this, please jump on the packagekit
mailinglist. See http://www.packagekit.org for details.

Richard.