• Launchpad Entry: kubuntu-maverick-kpackagekit-app-store

• Created:2010-05-14

• Contributors: JonathanRiddell, dantii

• Packages affected:kpackagekit, packagekit, app-install

Summary

An applications view for KPackageKit

Release Note

KPackageKit now includes an applications view for a more user focused install experience.

Rationale

Users don't care about packages, they care about applications.

User stories

Maggie wants to install this cool Umbrello app she's heard about. She goes to Add/Remove Software, finds the app and installs it.

Design

A new kcmodule which lists the application categories. Clicking on that shows the application categories based on XDG menu locations. Clicking on a category shows sub categories if appropriate and applications. The applications each have an icon and both short and long description. They have meta data such as free/restricted and supported/unsupported.

Implementation

app-install is a new upstream programme from the Packagekit developer to store information on applications. We will port app-install to Ubuntu by making it use the data from our app-install-data package.

The new KPackageKit Applications kcmodule will use app-install to get application data. PackageKit method getCategories() is used to get the XDG menu categories.

Reference spec: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/packagekit/plain/docs/app-install-v1.draft

app-install: http://github.com/hughsie/app-install

Other Changes

Switch to aptcc backend once distro upgrade notification and execution is supported. This will also give us debconf support in the near future.

Turn off the Packagekit cache which stores whether there are packages to be updated, it only gets out of sync with the system's reality.

Comments

It looks like this is focused on the backend requirements of an App Store, but not on creating a quality UI for it (very important for these end-user-focused specs). I'm willing to help with that part, when you get to the UI stage. -- aalpert

CategorySpec