Hello OpenSUSE! I am Matthias Klumpp and I will work on making the AppStream[1] project work for OpenSUSE as part of the Google Summer of Code this year. A little bit about myself: I study Molecular Biomedicine in my second semester at University of Bonn in Germany and I use Linux for years now. I contribute to KDE (mainly to Apper, the PackageKit-based KDE package manager) and I am PackageKit upstream developer, as well as the maintainer of Listaller, a cross-distro application installer, which has the goal to make installations of 3rd-party apps on multiple distributions as easy, generic and integrated as possible, by using just one package. (Yes, 3rd-party repos and native packages have some issues, just before you ask the obvious question ^^) I’m not really a typical KDE user, as I also use GNOME from time to time and contribute to GNOME (but just very unimportant things for now). Knowing both desktops and both communities is usually an advantage, and therefore I very much enjoyed the last Desktop Summit in Berlin. If you’ve been there, you might have met me there already ;-) I am Debian Maintainer and maintain all PackageKit and most PackageKit-related packages there. This means I also use Debian, so doing a project for OpenSUSE might look strange on the first look. But’s it’s not strange at all: I’m working on a cross-distro project so the distribution doesn’t matter that much. Also, SUSE was the first Linux distribution I've ever tried :-) - so I know OpenSUSE. In general kudos to openSUSE for doing the cross-distro GSoC tasks which no other distribution does! OpenSUSE has always been the distribution with the highest activity in this area, although they could’ve said “we don’t care about collaboration and interoperability”, which would’ve been perfectly sane. My greatest respect for that open-minded attitude and I’m really happy to work with you all! I already tweaked the Software-Center a little, so starting time is up to 420% faster, and we just need one call to PackageKit anymore, instead of doing thousands of Resolve() calls. Next weeks I'll work on a simple package information cache in PackageKit, which the SC will use then. The cache will also serve as some kind of PackageKit-backend-benchmark, as there is a plan to change PK's structure to allow parallel database-queries. But implementing that will take much longer than my GSoC (and it needs to be discussed first) So the cache is a viable solution right now. After that, I'll split out some components of SC, mainly the Xapian-database generator, and probably rewrite it in C++ (makes it faster and reusing the Python code won't necessarily be possible) This will make it possible to create different implementations of a Software-center, for example you could write one for KDE too. Then, I'll focus on tweaking the SC again, making it a pleasure to work with on other distributions. If I've time left, I'll also work on other parts of AppStream, but I want a great-looking-great-working Software Center first. I'll write weekly or biweekly status reports to this list, to keep you informed. It's cool to work on a cross-distro project for OpenSUSE and I'm looking forward to a great time! If you have any questions regarding anything written above, feel free to ask! :-) Matthias Klumpp -------- [1]: http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/AppStream -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org