On Mon, 2015-06-08 at 21:00 +0200, Stefan Seyfried wrote:
Hi Dominique,
Am 08.06.2015 um 11:29 schrieb Dimstar / Dominique Leuenberger:
Gerald,
On Fri, 2015-06-05 at 13:35 +0200, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
As an avid user of Factory/Tumbleweed, I am trying to update even while traveling when, often, Internet connectivity is slow and/or unreliable.
What I noticed is that trying to refresh appdata-icons.tar.gz (and appdata-failed.html) takes a disproportional amount of time. So I looked into
appdata-failed.html would be no problem to get rid of... it's mainly for 'reference purpose' and is not 'required' for operations (but looking at the size, I don't think those 350KB will really make a huge impact)
the icons tarball is a bit trickier. Removing this will mean to break the integration of software centers (currently only GNOME Software, KDE is planning an own one, even yast might go that way at one point).
I have asked this before, but it got lost apparently:
Why does zypper have to download this appdata stuff that it does not use at all (it tells me stuff about "the following applications will be removed: Konqueror" when I'm only updating packages and it cannot do anything useful with "Applications"). The "software centers" could download this huge piece of metadata once they needs it, but downloading this for simple "zypper ref" all the time really seems wasteful.
What CAN probably easily be done would be to eliminate the HiDPI (128x128) icons from the tarball.. of course, at the cost of users having a HiDPI screen. This would cut the size of appdata -icons.tar.gz down to 2.6MB from 7.5MB (I tried changing it to .xz or .bz2; it's not worth the efforts)
So, the question basically boils down to: do we want to have proper support for HiDPI in our setup or do we not care for those users.
If an "software center" runs on a HiDPI screen, it can downloas as many "appdata-icons-hidpi.tar.gz" as it wants, but for me, only running zypper in a terminal, I'd really like to not have to download any appdata at all.
You miss the full picture: the icons are used even outside the software center: in gnome-shell for example, if you type the name of an uninstalled app, the 'available app search provider' lists the application including the icon already. Having to launch a SC for this feature to work is not feasible. And: GNOME Software is so far only the first one to have proper support for the freedesktop AppStream metadata. There are discussions to teach this to Yast (IIRC, there was a GSoC proposal), KDE is surely coming with they SC, and I am sure others will too. I am all ears of slimming it down, but stripping it is just the wrong approach - UNLESS zypp can learn to download additional metadata based on plugins (there is already a plugin that tells it what to do out of the metadata - and that plugin is a dependency to GNOME-Software (and the gnome-shell search provider). So IF zypp can be thought to know about 'extensions' to the metadata, based on a plugin, I would be willing to extend this further - then it would become a proper optional thing. All other proposals (other than the meta downloads, which is apparently being looked at already) at just half baked solutions - taking away functionality. Dominique -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org