Fedora App Market Proof of Concept.

Yesterday someone was talking about installing apps in fedora and how it was hard to figure out what to install/try b/c there were too much STUFF in fedora. They suggested an ‘app store’ like functionality. I explained that all the resources to do something like that exist in the infrastructure yum and friends offer now. I decided to prove that concept a bit.

The concept of an ‘app’ is pretty amorphous but I decided to just use what Colin Walters said was his definition of an ‘app’ – which is any pkg containing a .desktop file. So I just whipped up a simple tool to dump out an xml-file of a format yum is already familiar with based on that criteria:

http://skvidal.fedorapeople.org/misc/appfinder.py

Running that generates an xml file with only the ‘apps’ defined.

Great. Then I wrote a yum plugin to access and use this data.

and I stuck it in this repo

1. copy this file into /etc/yum.repos.d/

2. run: yum install yum-plugin-appmarket

Now yum will have a few new commands available to it:

app-install    Install an App
app-list       List Apps
app-remove     Remove an App
app-search     Search for an App

Some examples:

yum app-search yum

won’t turn up ‘yum’ but it will turn up ‘yumex’.

Fancy, huh?

Now, the concept of an app can be refined in many ways but this is just to prove that the infrastructure has been available.