Adding search to the flatpak cli

in utopian-io •  7 years ago  (edited)

The CLI experience provided by flatpak is not the most user friendly experience and part of the problem was difficulty in discovering applications. Previously the only data it exposed access to was the OSTree metadata which didn't include much human friendly information.

Thankfully applications can provide AppStream metadata which was designed exactly for exposing information to users. With this information and a new dependency on appstream-glib we can add a search command to flatpak that loads up the appstream data for each configured remote and then searches through it matching the descriptions and names of applications.

A video of search in action:

asciicast

The main difficulties were providing enough information in the results to be useful, as the flatpak commands are a bit more verbose than other package managers, while not being overwhelming with information. Also a lot of packages don't include version information which is slowly being solved in existing packages.

Merge request: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/1136



Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

Authors get paid when people like you upvote their post.
If you enjoyed what you read here, create your account today and start earning FREE STEEM!
Sort Order:  

The @OriginalWorks bot has determined this post by @tingping to be original material and upvoted it!

ezgif.com-resize.gif

To call @OriginalWorks, simply reply to any post with @originalworks or !originalworks in your message!

Your contribution cannot be approved yet because it does not have proof of work because if your username in Utopian does not match that of Github, you need to provide logged in session of your Github Account and show the projects.

See the Utopian Rules. Please edit your contribution and add proof (links, screenshots, commits, etc) of your work, to reapply for approval.

You may edit your post here, as shown below:

You can contact us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]

You are mistaken, the linked PR is by "TingPing" the same name here and linked with this account.

Yeah Sorry, my bad. Accepted the contribution.

Thank you for the contribution. It has been approved.

You can contact us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]

Hey @tingping I am @utopian-io. I have just upvoted you!

Achievements

  • You have less than 500 followers. Just gave you a gift to help you succeed!
  • Seems like you contribute quite often. AMAZING!

Community-Driven Witness!

I am the first and only Steem Community-Driven Witness. Participate on Discord. Lets GROW TOGETHER!

mooncryption-utopian-witness-gif

Up-vote this comment to grow my power and help Open Source contributions like this one. Want to chat? Join me on Discord https://discord.gg/Pc8HG9x