First Bretzn Sprint: openSUSE App Store on the Horizon

Novell hosted the first Bretzn Sprint in the SUSE office in Nürnberg between 21th and the 23st of January. The objective of the sprint was to create an proof of concept application store for openSUSE.

This meeting is a direct follow up of the Cross-distribution meeting on application installer which took place in the 3 days leading up to the Bretzn sprint. During this meeting developers from Debian, Fedora, Mageia, openSUSE, and Ubuntu Linux distributions decided to work together on common APIs and code for application stores on Linux.

The Bretzn Sprint was dedicated to the development of a proof of concept of this idea, using existing components like the MeeGo Garage client and libattica as starting points.

Attendees of this meeting where Will Stephenson, Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frederik Gladhorn, Mateu Batle Sastre, Eugene Trounev, Vincent Untz, Pavol Rusnak and Frank Karlitschek. This team brought together a wide range of skills, as can be seen in the results of this highly productive sprint.

In just two and a half days, they managed to create a working application store client for openSUSE and KDE. The server part was based on OCS (Open Collaboration Services), which already did everything needed for the server side and just needed some data inserted to be shown in the client. The client in turn was created by using the MeeGo Garage client, and adapting it to be a more KDE-like application, by using the various KDE widgets and other tools, removing the duplication of functionality which was covered by the KDE libraries.

Finally, a new application view was created, to replace the existing which was never as pleasing as the original authors wanted it to be. This was done by using Qt Quick, which has allowed for the rapid construction of a much more pleasant look. The new interface is the result of a brainstorming session involving all members of the sprint, based on the results from thecross-distribution meeting. While this work is still in progress, it already represents an improvement over the old interface.

Article contributed by Frank Karlitschek