software-center doesn't respect X-AppInstall-AlwaysOnTop

Jordan, I haven't been able to find any description of X-AppInstall-AlwaysOnTop on the Ubuntu wiki or on the Web in general. Is there a specification for it somewhere, including use cases? I'm not wishing to relitigate whether it's necessary -- just trying to work out how best to present it, without confusing people about why some departments aren't in alphabetical order.

 The spec is located at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Specs/UbuntuJaunty/EducationAppBundles . mvo did the actual implementation so the spec is a little light on details. The idea is that an alphabetical listing is fine for general browsing of if you know the name of what you want, but it presents a problem if you want to make some packages (like metapackages) brought to the forefront. We didn't want to create a whole separate section in the g-a-i window because the idea is to have the window reflect the actual application menu the user sees.

Ok, I've specified a basic design for this for version 1.0, and a more sophisticated design for version 2.0.
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareStore?action=diff&rev2=195&rev1=194> For 1.0, "If any of the applications in the department have X-AppInstall-AlwaysOnTop set, those applications should be listed alphabetically at the top of the list, followed by a separator, followed by all the other applications."

Incidentally, I'm quite concerned at the inappropriateness of the metadata for these bundles as shown in 9.04. Why do they all have identical icons? Why do any of them use the phrases "educational desktop", "primary bundle", or "This package depends on"? And most importantly, why don't any of them give any clue as to what software they actually contain? These problems might have been fixed in Karmic (though I don't see changes since April in the files on code.launchpad.net). But if they haven't been, please let me know if you need any advice on fixing them in Lucid.

I can not ensure that I can get this implemented for karmic, sorry. I would suggest to keep add/remove for karmic in edubuntu in this case.

While I appreciate the usability regression for finding edubuntu addons, this is not a bug which is serious enough to block the 9.10 beta release, so I pushed it to final.

While we could use add/remove on the Edubuntu DVD, the primary purpose of the change was to allow Ubuntu users to install Edubuntu software selections from the internet without having to use the Edubuntu installation disk. So either software-store needs the implementation or we'll just do without for Karmic. In the whole scheme of things it's not the end of the world if it doesn't happen for Karmic, but it is a regression for Edubuntu and its deployment strategy.

Michael, I'm assigning this to you, as you're the likely implementor. Thanks.

I removed the target for 9.10. Its not going to be implemented in time (sorry for that). A probably more critical issue for edubuntu is bug #449337 - software-center does not support the whole addon cd concept.

One solution is to keep gnome-app-install in ubuntu so that we have the addon mechanism, another one would be to use synaptic for this cycle and fix it properly for lucid.

Michael,

Better yet, Edubuntu got rid of the Add-on CD for Karmic so as far as we're concerned the the lack of addon cd handling is no problem. I'm sure other people would like to use it at some point though so it might be nice to include it at some point.

declining the karmic target, per Michael's comments

I markt this won't fix for karmic, we need to discuss a solution for lucid.

We have a feature to add additional top level Categories (Departments) easily now. You just need to drop a .menu file in /usr/share/app-install/menu.d - I think this is a sufficient replacement for the AlwaysOnTop mechanism and I would like to suggest to use that.

Setting to "incomplete" to get feedback if the proposed change is ok or if it clashes with some of the use-cases.

I think that the "Departments" method will likely work fine (or maybe better) for Edubuntu. I've subscribed the Edubuntu Council so that they can give more input.

Is this still an issue

Four months later, we've had no feedback, so I've removed the X-AppInstall-AlwaysOnTop details from the specification. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter?action=diff&rev2=382&rev1=381>

If the Edubuntu developers (or anyone else) want special emphasis for a particular set of packages, please let us know separately, and we can design a more thorough solution.