Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 1464139
Some applications listed by gnome-software cannot be installed on big-endian architectures
Last modified: 2018-07-19 04:39:02 EDT
Created attachment 1290726 [details] full log Description of problem: There are several applications which are listed by gnome-software but cannot be installed. I randomly found the following list of affected applications: brasero, bluefish editor, dia diagram editor and codeblocks. The affected architectures are s390x and ppc64. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gnome-software-3.22.7-1.el7.ppc64 How reproducible: always on mentioned architectures. Steps to Reproduce: 1.run gnome-software 2.search for brasero 3.click install Actual results: Eror message window: installing not available Expected results: Should install the application or application should not be listed if it is not available. Additional info: output (full log including 3 install fails is uploaded above) from gnome-software --verbose from the moment in which error has occured: ... 13:19:47:0856 As run 0xaea28680~GsPlugin::provenance-license(gs_plugin_refine) 13:19:49:0772 As run 0x3ffe4002770~GsPlugin::packagekit(gs_plugin_app_install) 13:19:49:0772 Gs failed to call gs_plugin_app_install on packagekit: installing not available 13:19:49:0772 Gs saving error for system/package/rhel-7/desktop/brasero.desktop/*: installing not available 13:19:49:0772 As run 0x3ffe4002770~GsPlugin::shell-extensions(gs_plugin_app_install) 13:19:49:0772 As run 0x3ffe4002770~GsPlugin::flatpak(gs_plugin_app_install) 13:19:49:0772 Gs adding system/package/rhel-7/desktop/brasero.desktop/* as nothing matched hash 13:19:49:0772 Gs adding system/package/rhel-7/desktop/brasero.desktop/* as nothing matched hash ... In addition I tried: [test@ibm-z-40 ~]$ pkcon install brasero Resolving [ ] (0%) Package not found: brasero Command failed: This tool could not find any available package: No packages were found
Created attachment 1290729 [details] erro message screenshot
This isn't a trivial bug. GNOME Software uses the AppStream data as a way of mapping between package name and application ID. Rather than checking a thousand things at startup, it assumes that "if a desktop file exists" then the component is installed. It also assumes that "if there's an appstream entry, then the component is install-able". This works well on the all the architectures I've tested. The fly in the ointment is that the metadata is generated against x86_64, as it was *assumed* by me that all architectures would have the same set of applications available to install. Making this assumption means the generator takes ~2 hours to run rather than ~1 day. I guess there are multiple ways to fix this: * start generating per-arch metadata * do not include gnome-software on s390x * find out (and fix) why some apps are not built on s390x I'm happy helping with either option 1 or 2.
This should be mostly fixed upstream with https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/commit/be2b5970a3e1de08d59681b9c15b88d7cc4ce53e that hides apps that are in appstream metadata, but not actually available in repos. There's still the issue of appstream metadata not being 100% correct as it's generated on different architecture, but that's something to fix another time I think.
I've tried to check today, the brasero is not longer listed by gnome-software , overall there are notably smaller amount of applications listed in every category so I think the fix was successful but I am not able to verify this because of bug 1591270