On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 05:47:18PM +0200, Adrian von Bidder wrote: > My proposal (which is orthogonal) is linking to applications, just to show > that Debian is not just an operating system as defined on our title page > ("set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run.") It seems odd not to see the AppStream project mentioned here: I think that is the direction in which to focus these kinds of efforts: http://www.enricozini.org/2011/debian/appinstaller2011/ I'm chiming in with a few links and comments, and I urge you to have a good look because most of what you are talking about has been prototyped, or at least standardised in a cross-distro way: http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/AppStream/Implementation Although in AppStream you will see that the main point is to build an application installer, as a precondition for that there is a need to build standard ways of accessing extra useful information like screenshots, various kinds of ratings, tags and user comments. Those standards could and should be used to build all sorts of other things, including fancy web-based application browsers: http://www.enricozini.org/2011/debian/pkgshelf/ In fact, you can take the graph at http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/AppStream/Implementation and replace 'Software Center' and 'PackageKit' with 'Website': this gives you pretty much the architecture you need. I suggest you do exactly that: you'll find code and people to talk to, and it's a development effort that is likely to be shared with other groups and built upon. Ciao, Enrico -- GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enrico@enricozini.org>
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