buy-something team mailing list archive

[Julian Edwards <julian.edwards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Is everyone interested on the buy-something list yet?  I hate CC-ing this many 
people.

On Thursday 17 June 2010 15:50:58 Francis J. Lacoste wrote:
> Is there still a need to maintain the list of "commercial" PPAs in
> Launchpad? I mean, why not manage that information in the agent itself.
> List of P3As that contain software for sale.
> Why does Launchpad needs that info at all?

We decided a while ago that LP is the "registry" of apps since it already 
knows all about them.  It makes sense for us anyway as they will have (or 
potentially have) different characteristics to regular private PPAs and it's 
pointless re-implementing this in the agent.  Let's keep the agent simple!

> >  * return a list of existing subscriptions (these are sources.list
> >  entries
> > 
> > in fact)
> 
> Even that one is probably not needed. What we need is a way for the agent
> to query if a user is subscribed to a PPA and subscribe him if he's not.
> From the point of view of the Agent, a user is an openid identifier.

This is absolutely needed in the case where a user fires up a brand new 
desktop and wants to know/install what they already paid for.

> The list of stuff you bought is managed in the Agent itself.

I think that is a bad idea since we already have all that data in Launchpad 
for free.

> >  * return sources.list entry given a person and a PPA
> 
> For a given openid identifier and a PPA. The Agent shouldn't care about
> persons. Launchpad needs to handle translation between openid identifiers
> and its association with Person.
> 
> > Launchpad is also doing two new custom upload file types on software
> > packages: meta-data and icons, which are pushed through to the repository
> > area unmodified.  I'm happy for desktops to hit that directly as long as
> > IS is okay too, since it's served from Apache, although the agent could
> > use the webservice call to get the list of PPAs and then grab the
> > meta-data itself - that's up to the people doing the agent.
> 
> It all depends if the Agent needs the metadata itself or not. If the flow
> of information is:
> 
> 1- Sotware Centre asks Agent for list of P3As with stuff.
> 2- Software Centre retrieves meta data from P3As.
> 
> Then I guess the answer is no.
> 
> If instead it's:
> 
> 1- Software Centre asks Agent for meta-data.
> 
> Then the answer is yes. And in that case, I'm questioning the need to
> upload the meta-data to Soyuz anyway.

This was decided on a while ago and I've already implemented this (it's easy).  
Someone (mvo?) said that it's easier if we keep the data with the source 
package.  Soyuz isn't actually doing anything with the data, it's just 
publishing it unaltered in the archive.  But this has the advantage that in 
the future we'll be able to put that meta-data on the PPA pages in Launchpad 
if we want.

J