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I was just thinking about current status of package management and software installation/unistallation under the free desktop, and a "maybe stupid" idea came to my mind. I think that distros should start providing a dbus service concerning packages, so that the current desktop can easily interact with package installation and unistallation.

It would be in fact really nice to be able to drag and drop an application to the trash to unistall it completely. Or simply be able to install required dependencies from an installer file...

To be useful, this service should be able to provide informations about files and packages, as well as status about running tasks...

It has been almost 2 weeks that I am in India. This country is very surprising and very different from all hat I saw until now, it's raining the whole day, and at the same time it's hot. People here are very nice and very helpful but very lazy :)

This is also the most bureaucratic country I have seen until now, to get a phone prepaid SIM card you have to fill-in forms, attach your photo, sign everywhere, submit the form, and wait until it get processed... To open a bank account you need to fill a 8 pages form, attach your photo, sign everywhere, bring a recommendation letter from a bank client... I think that they like forms, signatures and xerox copies of passport in this country :D

I came to India to study for 1 year at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology of Bombay, and I was pleased to find that almost every computer in this institute is using free software, even in the administrations, a GNU/Linux system is there, and most of the time it is running the Gnome desktop. Maybe all developing nations should follow India's path in this domain, and make use of free software, my home country : Morocco is actually very bound to proprietary software, and this is too bad...

I had CS courses here, especially one about machine learning, and I started thinking about making use of it for the Freedesktop, I'll maybe write a paper about this once i get some free time.

Currently audio and video players on the Linux Desktop are starting to embrace Gstreamer to deal with audio and video ... that's really a good thing that helps avoiding duplicated efforts, and that also helps focusing on enhancing things instead of reinventing the wheel ...
The next step, would be a unification of meta-data storage. This would greatly ease multimedia players development, as well as user experience, since meta-data could be shared between all players, and user won't have to re-import all his media file again ...

I just discovered gnome-blog (http://www.gnome.org/~seth/gnome-blog/) , and i am giving it a try.

I was thinking about a way to improve open source developper experience, and I tought that it would be nice to have some sort of heavily configurable and searchable documentation. This tool would support configurable list of "knowledge source" that can be setup on startup.