On Sat, 2017-02-25 at 03:26 -0500, Felix Miata wrote:
André Verwijs composed on 2017-02-25 09:00 (UTC+0100):
with TW i always get this... The following 4 applications are going to be REMOVED: Cuttlefish Desktop "Grouping Plasmoid" "System Tray" but packages are not installed...
Right, they're not. Applications and packages are not the same thing. Only YaST knows what applications are. Zypper only guesses what to do, and doesn't actually do anything except confuse users with useless messages
So, from now on we will have to call you zypper - because what you say is wrong and is confusing our users. Half-jokes aside, I already created different mails with probably about the same content as to what is to come next: the FACTs to this topic, no half truth, no speculation. The message as seen by Andre can have basically two reasons - both of them being bugs - in different systsms: * The user has additional repositories enabled bysided openSUSE Tumbleweed and said repository does not provide complete/valid AppStream metadata. This is currently the case for pretty much all the OBS repos - as the process to extract this information out of packages into the repomd metastructure is more than fragile and is very unreloable. If anybody wants to work on this, claim https://progress.opensuse.org/issues/15436 If the user has NO 3rd party repos enabled and sees the messages on a pure Tumbleweed system, then the user is caught by a packaging bug. * Whenever a Tumbleweed snapshot is processed, a new set of AppStream metadata is being produced using AppStream Builder. This tool parses all the RPMs and extracts the requires information. For this, it looks for .appdata.xml and .metainfo.xml files inside /usr/share/appdata and /usr/share/metainfo (the two directories are equally treated, .appdata.xml and .metainfo.xml are allowed in BOTH locations. The latter is slowly superseding the first, as the name is more suitable for the long tirm goal of AppStream) For the 'System Tray' one mentioned by Andree for example there is already a bug files in bugzill, see http://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1024326 Most common issues for such bugs I noted down in a blob post a while back http://dominique.leuenberger.net/blog/2016/07/how-to-fix-my-application -does-not-show-up-in-software-centers/ Now, to get back to zypper, eh, Felix' statements: the component in the software stack that knows about this is libzypp - used by zypper and yast equally. zypper (not Felix, the real zypper) is the one that understands this and informs the user about it; you can even query and install 'applications' (which is not the same as packages - often the names match though) using zypper. A list of all applications known: zypper se -t application Yast, so far, does not have any representation of the concept of 'Applications' - it only treats 'Packages' There are other tools, so called 'Software Centers' that focus solely on Applications and remove the concept of packages from the visible pool for the user: a 'User' generally should care for 'WHat do I want to do' and not 'how the heck did the packager call this and that'; and he needs visual appealing representation. We currently have these Software Centers in openSUSE Tumbleweed: * GNOME Software * KDE Discover I'm sure others will follow suite (I thought I had seen a 3rd one already pass by) In the hopes that we will now STOP spreading false claims on this topic: remember this mail, feel free to reference it whenever a similar question comes up. And if you see such things and can confirm it is NOT 3rd parties interfering here: file bugs and have this fixed! And as Stats are nice: http://gs-stats.opensuse.org shows a trend graph over how many 'applications' are known inside openSUSE Tumbleweed Cheers, Dominique