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- Application Install Tool for Whore^WHoary Hedgehog
- Ross Burton <ross@burtonini.com>
-
-
- The application presents to the user a list of applications which can be
- installed or removed. These applications are either end-user applications (such
- as OpenOffice, GIMP, Gaim) or server-side roles (HTTP server, FTP server).
- These can be added and removed by toggling a check box. The applications will
- be shown in a tree identical to the Applications menu on the panel, and system
- roles in a separate list.
-
- The package information based on Freedesktop .desktop files. This is due to all
- end-user applications already having a .desktop file which can be extended with
- a small amount of metadata for use by the application install tool. These
- .desktop files will be extracted from the Hoary archive automatically and a
- package solely containing .desktop files and the relevant icons created.
-
- For a package to be available the .desktop file must have a X-AppInstall-Package
- key under the [Desktop Entry] group, which is the name of the package the
- desktop file relates too. The Name, Comment and Icon keys will be used in the
- interface.
-
-
- Example 1: Sound Juicer
-
- [Desktop Entry]
- Encoding=UTF-8
- Name=Sound Juicer CD Ripper
- Comment=Extract music from your CDs
- Exec=sound-juicer
- Icon=sound-juicer.png
- StartupNotify=true
- Terminal=false
- Type=Application
- Categories=GNOME;Application;AudioVideo;
- X-AppInstall-Package=sound-juicer
-
- The only change her from the upstream .desktop file is the X-AppInstall-Package
- key, which marks this application as to be displayed in the interface. The
- existing Name, Comment and Icon fields are displayed to the user in the
- interface.
-
-
- Example 2: OpenOffice.org
-
- OpenOffice.org installs a number of .desktop files, none of which are suitable
- for displaying in an Application Install tool as they are for particular aspects
- of the suite (i.e. Writer or Impress). In this case a new .desktop file is
- added to the package, which contains the required information alongside a
- Hidden=true key. The Hidden key ensures that it won't be displayed in any
- application menus, but can be picked up by the Application Install Tool.
-
- [Desktop Entry]
- Encoding=UTF-8
- Name=OpenOffice.org
- Comment=Powerful office suite
- Icon=ooo.png
- Type=Application
- Categories=GNOME;Application;Office;
- X-AppInstall-Package=openoffice.org
-
-
- The menu layout is based upon the Freedesktop menu specification. Currently
- GNOME does not support this standard, but hopefully GNOMEE 2.10 will. At the
- moment the Application Install Tool includes a copy of the Applications menu
- structure in the Freedesktop menu format, which can be removed if GNOME 2.10
- does move to it. [note: this depends on API additions to PyXDG]
-
-
- TODO: Instead of X-AppInstall-Package, use X-AppInstall-Packages which is a list
- of required packages. This will primarily used for the "Web Server" role which
- would require "apache-mpm-worker" and "apache2-doc" at least. The UI should
- represent partial-installs and allow the user to fully install or remove a
- partial install. I'm not sure if this or enforcing Recommends: to be installed
- is a better solution.
-
- TODO: Currently the X-AppInstall-Icon key is used in preference over the Icon
- key if the standard Icon is not suitable. I'm not sure there is a solid
- use-case for this.
-