AppStream, Discover and metadata

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday, November 10, 2015 05:45:02 PM Aleix Pol wrote:
> Hi Kubuntu (and Debian KDE, that also applies there),
> If you were at Akademy in Brno you might remember a guy blabbing on
> about how important it was to adopt AppStream. That was me.
> 
> Now we have AppStream on Ubuntu, so I've been asking myself what's the
> correct path to take. It's not entirely trivial to go forward, so I'd
> like to know your opinion.
> 
> - Kubuntu 15.10 has Plasma 5.4. For this one we still use app-install data.
> - Kubuntu 16.04 will use a future version of Plasma (either 5.5 or 5.6)
> 
> AFAIU, Ubuntu 16.04 is adopting Gnome Software as ultimate solution,
> dropping their home-grown software. This means that those technologies
> will probably be useful and properly supported there.
> 
> My proposal is to adopt PackageKit + AppStream as well (i.e.
> Discover's PackageKit backend, that shares technology with Gnome
> Software). This will allow us to drop quite some of our code while
> keeping the same code that is already working on other platforms.
> Sounds like a win-win.
> 
> This will require though some help on QA on the Kubuntu side and
> assessment that no ultimately important features got lost in the way
> (some will though).
> 
> As for Debian, using the QApt backend doesn't work there, since it
> uses app-install which was deprecated some time ago.
> 
> An intermediate solution, if you guys don't love how PackageKit +
> AppStream works on Kubuntu, would be to port the QApt backend to use
> AppStream. This is already in a branch, but it's also untested and I
> still think that using the same backend as the rest of the distros can
> only be beneficial for all of us.

My personal experience with PackageKit + Apper was very poor.  It was my 
experience that PackageKit's apt integration was just a thin graft on top of 
(or under depending on your perspective) something designed to work with RPM 
and really didn't work at all well in Kubuntu. I don't know if it was because 
of the Apper design or inherent in PackageKit, but it had it's own package 
cache that seemed to be frequently out of sync with apt (note: aptitude 
does/did something similar and associated problems have caused me to stay far 
away from it as well).

In my limited free time I've been working on making QApt + Muon work better in 
Debian and if there's a newer thing in that direction to test, I'd be glad to 
test it on Debian.

Scott K