Last week I attended two very interesting developer sprints at the SUSE office in Nürnberg.

More and more people in the Linux world realize that a nice application installer (Application Store) is needed to make the Linux platform more attractive for normal users and third party developers. The current package managers expose way to much complexity to the end users. The normal users doesn´t care about dependencies, libraries and other internals. But the user cares about things like screenshots, description texts, ratings. tags, comments, recommendation from friends and other features which current package managers don´t provide. So the idea grow to build a better tool for finding and installing applications which sits on top of the current package management.

It´s part of the Bretzn project to build something like this.

The first sprint last week brought people from all major Linux distributions on one table to discuss ways to work together to build a common application installer API and infrastructure. Developers from RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mandriva and Mageia met and discussed ways to make this happen. After 2 and a half days we all agreed on an architecture and we will work in the next few month to bring this to all majors distributions. I´m happy that OCS was chosen as the standard API to access App Store Servers.

The second sprint was the Bretzn sprint which took place directly afterwards and was all about coding.

Several people from openSUSE and KDE met to build a proof of concept implementation of an Application Store for openSUSE and KDE.

This second sprint was also super productive so after another weekend we have a basic App Store client together with a server running. All the basic features are in place and it just needs a bit more polishing.

There is a news story coming up with some more information and screenshots. So stay tuned if you are looking for more information. 🙂