Proposing a New App Developer Upload Process

[Michael Hall]

On 09/05/2012 02:08 PM, Emmet Hikory wrote:
>     Regardless of our final decision with regard to the implementation
> limiting the impact on users of potentially malicious automatically
> reviewed applications, I think we ought continue to make efforts so
> that our tools support /opt properly.  There are many existing popular
> and successful free and commercial applications using /opt today for
> other unices, and we can only benefit by reducing the porting effort
> for this software to Ubuntu.
> 

It's important to remember that when we say "support /opt/ properly"
what we really mean is "support /opt/extras.ubuntu.com/* properly".  We
aren't just using /opt/ as an install prefix, we making a different
install prefix for every single application, and that means that every
tool is going to need to consider every install prefix for every
application that might be installed.

But at the same time we're not currently making those app-specific
install prefixes actual alternatives to /usr/, they don't contain
/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/{appname}/share/applications/{appname}.desktop,
or /opt/extras.ubuntu.com/{appname}/share/pixmaps/{appname}.png

So even if we did make all of our tools use $XDG_DATA_DIRS, and we did
include every installed Extras app in $XDG_DATA_DIRS, they still
wouldn't work because we're not making those directories behave like an
XDG_DATA_DIR should.

Michael Hall
mhall119 at ubuntu.com