1.5 - gnome-packagekit?

[Peter Robinson]

>> Furthermore, the App Store has strong incentives to update and release
>> new software constantly.  Each new app is placed into a 'new app' view
>> that encourages installation of new apps.  It extends their marketing
>> beyond keyterm search and apple's ranking/voting system (which has
>> problems with popularity bias: apps that are popular get more popular
>> because they are popular).
>>
>> Free software (ideally) has incentives to improve existing software,
>> contributing towards existing projects/packages and discourages
>> creating trivial clones of existing software.   That is ignoring the
>> clones we make of proprietary software.
>>
>
> Granted that a lot of what is offered in the Apple app store is
> recycled and not very interesting, but it is an ecology that is
> encouraging some level of participation. My reason for bringing this
> up in this thread is that I think we could be more packaging-friendly
> to the newbie or want-to-be developer in terms of growing our
> ecosystem. A goal of the XO bundling scheme was to make it easy to
> participate. We shouldn't lose sight of that goal if we want to expand
> the culture of free software.

I have some ideas and tools that should allow us to go from git tag to
a built rpm in a repository automatically with very little effort from
any developer. Basically they create a basic ini type config file and
when a release is tagged a couple of tools combined pop a rpm out the
other end. I'm hoping to have some time to do more of this in January.
It should make creating packages even easier than the current .xo
format and make the packaging side of things a non event for
developers. That and with PackageKit on the client side the whole
process from beginning to end should be very simple.

Peter