Experiment: an RPM that shows uninstalled apps in main menu

[Denis Leroy]

Andrew Farris wrote:
> Denis Leroy wrote:
>> 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).
> 
> One issue right now is that all those applications show up as options in 
> the 'open with' menus of Gnome right now, even the not installed apps.  
> If you try to open an image with gimp while the fedora-apps rpm is 
> installed the menu will show many image editors and viewers you don't 
> have installed.  That obviously needs to be prevented.

Yes I noticed also. I think it's just a matter of filtering the Mime 
entries out of the desktop files...