Haven't tried spotify in a long while, but yes I do seem to remember they only ship a
deb currently.
Skype are shipping an RPM still. Of course we have no guarantee they will continue doing
so, which was part of
what we where hoping to do here. By offering the inclusion in the software center we could
have used that to try to ensure vedors keep
supporting Fedora or start supporting Fedora.
As for making it easy to package software, isn't that what the LinuxApps plan is all
about?
Christian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bastien Nocera" <bnocera(a)redhat.com>
To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop"
<desktop(a)lists.fedoraproject.org>
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2014 12:15:50 PM
Subject: Re: Fedora board vote and way forward
----- Original Message -----
> My take away from the discussion so far is that the current board would not
> accept
> anything that 'automates' access to such external software. Doesn't
matter
> if
> we ship
> the metadata on the ISO or not.
>
> The only thing that I can see flying with the current board is a system
> that
> is 'blind' to what it is offering, just like
> a web browser.
How is that a better solution than making it easier to add new repositories
through
the web browser? Or through a URL copy/paste in the software center?
My naive approach would be to:
- allow repositories to be defined by a single URL (this is what third-party
repositories
for Synology, iOS jailbreak, Cyanogen, etc. use)
- use a custom scheme in the software center to pass those URLs, eg.
gnome-software://rpmrepos.org/my-stable-repo
or even defining multiple repos with a single URL:
gnome-software://rpmrepos.org
The software center can now show you the list of repositories offered by
this URL
- Convince repo maintainers to add those URLs to web pages
One-click in the web browser, confirm in Software center. It also works for
both
proprietary repos and free software restricted ones. The user can find out
about the
repos through the existing page, that could be linked from the Software
center as well:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Third_party_repositories
Having said that, I don't think this is the blocker problem for most users.
They know how
to find the repositories they need ("fedora rpm nvidia" in Google?), the
problem is
providing making it easy for developers to package their wares for Fedora.
Have you recently tried to install Skype or Spotify on a Fedora machine? It's
all about
running alien (in the same way that Debian users ran alien 10 years ago to
convert
proprietary RPMs to debs).
Hashing out application bundles and making sure that whatever gets selected
also works
on Ubuntu would be the best way to convince the makers of those products to
ship them
in a format that Fedora can understand and install.
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