Drop Ubuntu Software Centre and Adopt GNOME Software

[Iain Lane]

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.

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?)
  - 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,

-- 
Iain Lane                                  [ iain at orangesquash.org.uk ]
Debian Developer                                   [ laney at debian.org ]
Ubuntu Developer                                   [ laney at ubuntu.com ]
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