Where do I find all my apps?

Project Discussion
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I’m a newcomer and I’ve been spending some free time jumping into different areas of Fedora where I can help. One thing I’ve noticed is that as a new contributor that there’s a lot of apps everywhere and not a really good single source of truth of all the things I could use to help me.

At my company, we use the Microsoft My Applications dashboard and every app I use to do my work is on there. Mozilla has an equivalent for their community.

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It would be nice to have a hub that shows me the tools I use to volunteer. Between Docs, the Wiki, Discussion, GitLab/pagure.io, and even Matrix - I’ve found there is a lot of places to look for information.

Not to say we need an App for Apps, but it would be nice if we had a defined “here’s where to start”. Even if it was baked into Fedora Accounts/noggin.

I did find this page http://apps.fedoraproject.org but I am not sure how up to date it is, or if it just reflects the Website & Apps team apps (or any just ran by CPE).

Just to start, a basic HTML page with tiles similar to the Mozilla one would be super helpful and would be visually similar to most workplace SSO platforms like Okta, Microsoft AAD, and others so new contributors would be familiar with it.

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Yeah, that’s what I was going to point you to. That was an attempt at creating the dashboard you’re looking for, but it’s unmaintained and very out of date.

Maybe this could be something for https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/, or another docs page? I’m going to add the docs-team tag to this post. :slight_smile:

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Yeah, this page is very helpful to get an overview (or would be, were it up to date). I had already suggested about 2 years ago to make a link to it a part of every footer. It would be a great step forward.

Would could be the improvement of creating another docs page?

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I personally use my phone to access some Fedora services and it would be better if the page was responsive in some way. The current web of apps is hard to use on mobile devices.

The tiles approach I mentioned originally would be helpful for that as an example. If we could do maybe a similar approach for a landing page of all of Fedora Apps in Docs, I would be happy to start compiling a list of those. Maybe to start:

  • App Name
  • URL
  • Description
  • A suggested tag or grouping

And then we could create a page in the docs that contributors and project team could access.

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Well, that page was obviously not created with “mobile first” in mind. I’t needs a different Layout for small screens. I think, that’s easier and less work than to create a completely new page.

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I think the existing apps.fedoraproject.org tool is more pretty than useful, as it exists now.

However, I am reminded of another thing — there is some documentation from the Fedora Infrastructure team. This is from the viewpoint of services rather than apps (and generally a sysadmin perspective rather than an end-user one), and there are some things which might be out of scope of Fedora Infrastructure missing — notably, hosted services like Chat and Discussion, but maybe others too.

See Fedora services :: Fedora Docs and Map of critical services :: Fedora Docs.

There’s even a picture of those classified as critical:

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OK - so this is just an idea (more like a sketch really) of what we could do.

I incorporated the existing apps.yaml from the current site and just rendered them as tiles. This example also loads some of the content so it’s easier for screen readers to tell the description of the app and the service.

Since this is rendering the apps.yaml on the fly, we could keep editing the existing file and just update it to reflect the current apps & services better including those hosted by CPE, community, and SaaS.

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I like it!

Some possible enhancements that I can think of:

  • have some basic categories: packaging, communications, … actually, I’m not sure exactly. But some groupings!
  • a one-liner description for each
  • a (dynamic) search feature
  • links to:
    • docs
    • where to get help (maybe Ask Fedora template links? [1]
    • the code and issue tracker
  • an indicator for SLE (service level expectations)
  • Maybe an indicator for “app community health” (there’s an earlier topic on this — I’ll find it later if no one bests me to it)

All of this metadata could be added to the yaml… Maybe, in fact, we could make a single source of truth shared with the infra docs?

  1. https://meta.discourse.org/t/create-a-link-to-start-a-new-topic-with-pre-filled-information/28074 ↩︎

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OK - I added some more to it then to add additional functionality.

  • Use the grouping from the original yaml as categories
  • Description is now available if you click the [ ? ] button to see a model about the app, along with any links found in the Yaml file
  • SLE / App Community can be added to the Yaml file and exposed to the model that appears

Now I can clean up the Apps.yaml file and move around what’s still in use and what’s not to match what Infra shows. :slight_smile:

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Found and added a few more apps:

  • Packager Dashboard
  • Matrix
  • Discussion
  • Project Schedule

Marked as Legacy:

  • Nuancier (not been used since 2020)

My latest version of the dashboard is up on Fedora People here and my latest apps.yaml is here.

I want to open this up to a few voices - does it even make sense to keep updating on a solution like this or move it fully into Docs with the SaaS / updated tools reflecting?

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I just want to add that this is gorgeous and I wish we could productionize something like this for all Fedorans!

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What’s keeping us?

I looked at @rwright’s work before. Maybe less eye candy than the current apps.fp.o, but easier to find what one is looking for, easier to navigate.

I was wondering, where are the icons taken from? In particular, the Badges (of course!) logo looks odd. For a default, fall back icon, I would like something with a little more depth instead of the flat two-tone Fedora logo.

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All of the icons are the ones from the current tool, just sized up. I was on a quest at one point to find more of them as well as a better “no icon” default.

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This is exactly what I was looking for a couple of weeks ago when I started exploring Fedora.
I like it!

Another app that I think would fit the list is Fedora Weblate.

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Great list.
I have a proposal to extend the list and add a links to repo and a tracker/issues for each app.

As example, i spended some time to research where the sources
of badges.f.o public site is and where to fill a bug (still unsure Outdated info on /about in prod (wrong branch?) · Issue #465 · fedora-infra/tahrir · GitHub someone reads this? )

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Well, Badges is currently undergoing a revamp. What you see on GitHub
are the various, very outdated components it uses. The issue trackers,
while still open, are no longer actively monitored by the developers
and/or maintainers of the software. We do not intend on updating these
or pushing new releases.

For issues with badges, albeit quite a few are already known to be
broken at the moment for various reasons, you can open a ticket on
Pagure.

If you’d like to follow the progress of the revamp (and maybe contribute
to that, head over to
GitLab and/or
follow the discussion
here. :badger:

1 Like