Drop Ubuntu Software Centre and Adopt GNOME Software

[Tim]

On 01/08/15 02:50, Iain Lane wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 08:13:39PM +0300, Amr Ibrahim wrote:
>> Dear developers,
>>
>> USC is getting old. It is in Python 2, and probably will never be ported to Python 3.
>>
>> I suggest dropping USC in future Ubuntu releases and adopt GNOME Software.
>>
>> GNOME Software is build on newer GNOME technologies. It, of course, needs some modifications to support the same features which are supported by USC, like purchasing applications.
> I think some work on a port was undertaken a while ago, but stalled
> because not all dependencies were ported. So it might not be a big job
> to pick that up and move USC to Python 3.
>
> It is fair to say that the software centre hasn't seen much feature
> development in recent times. I agree that it would be interesting for us
> to look into adopting GNOME Software in future. I've not looked at it
> much myself but it seems as if it would provide a nice user experience.
We obviously want this for Ubuntu GNOME
>
> There would be some problems to solve first though - off the top of my
> head they include
>
>   - How to provide Appstream/DEP-11 metadata (what's the status of this
>     in Debian? How's our coverage?)
I believe this is close, its running in tanglu at the moment, and shouldnt be far off landing in debian. They have a dedicated server that
generates the metadata and then syncs it into the archive, I believe. Been meaning to chat with Matthias about this to get further details though.
>   - Ratings and Reviews - do we need to support them? If so, that will
>     need to be added.
>   - Purchasing. Do we still want a way to purchase things? What about
>     people who already did so on previous releases - how can we keep
>     giving them access to their goodies?
>   - Smaller tweaks like adding installed programs (with desktop files)
>     to the launcher, UI changes for Unity, …
>
> Just my views. I don't know what the rest of the desktop team thinks,
> but I'd be keen to at least investigate the possibility of doing this,
> unless we decide to dust USC off.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
>