Experiment: an RPM that shows uninstalled apps in main menu

[Yaakov Nemoy]

On Jan 21, 2008 10:25 AM, Jon Ciesla <limb at jcomserv.net> wrote:
> > On Sun, 2008-01-20 at 02:22 +0100, Denis Leroy wrote:
> >> This is an idea I've had about a year ago and gave some thought on and
> >> off since then, but Richard Hughes has mentioned a similar idea several
> >> times on this list as well.
> >>
> >> The idea is to show the (large number of) applications available to
> >> Fedora users through yum, but instead of a linear list displayed in
> >> pirut for example, show them directly in the main menu: that way the
> >> available apps are already categorized in a familiar way, and you can
> >> see the application icons and short descriptions through the menu
> >> tooltip.
> >
> > This just sounds like an awesome idea to me. I wonder how tightly could
> > that be integrated into Gnome and the desktop file specification. It
> > would be kind of elegant if the .desktop file contained a boolean
> > stating if the application is installed.
>
> If the app isn't installed, there would be no .desktop.  No?

I don't remember offhand who posted this to a Fedora mailing list, but
he mentioned a pie-in-the-sky idea, where we maintain a package
database complete with icons and other rich metadata.  It would be a
separate package with it's own data to manage, that no one but the
maintainers would be responsible for.  It seems to me that this seems
to be the sanest answer to handling such a database of apps that
aren't actually installed.

Anything else would probably be a gross ugly hack, and I can imagine
the complaining there'll be all the way down the road until the
finished product comes out.

Just my (increasingly devalued) 0.02 USD

-Yaakov