Hide apps from the Ubuntu repos

[meisenzahl]

Closes #1432

Before

After

Implementation

Most simple way to hide apps from Ubuntu repos based on

appcenter/src/Core/Package.vala

Lines 333 to 343 in ea7f524

	public string origin_description {
	owned get {
	unowned string origin = component.get_origin ();
	if (backend is PackageKitBackend) {
	if (origin == APPCENTER_PACKAGE_ORIGIN) {
	return _("AppCenter");
	} else if (origin == DEPRECATED_ELEMENTARY_STABLE_PACKAGE_ORIGIN || origin == ELEMENTARY_STABLE_PACKAGE_ORIGIN) {
	return _("elementary Updates");
	} else if (origin.has_prefix ("ubuntu-")) {
	return _("Ubuntu (non-curated)");
	}

[hanaral]

This is obviously a good thing in the long term, but should it be done before releasing a new version of io.elementary.BaseApp?

[davidmhewitt]

The more efficient way to do this would be to ensure that those appstream components are never loaded into the pool in the first place, so we don't have to iterate over however many thousand components and do a string comparison.

I think this patch (against master) achieves that but I haven't had chance to test it thoroughly:

diff --git a/src/Core/PackageKitBackend.vala b/src/Core/PackageKitBackend.vala
index cd258abc..ceb34167 100644
--- a/src/Core/PackageKitBackend.vala
+++ b/src/Core/PackageKitBackend.vala
@@ -151,6 +151,15 @@ public class AppCenterCore.PackageKitBackend : Backend, Object {
 
         package_list = new Gee.HashMap<string, AppCenterCore.Package> (null, null);
         appstream_pool = new AppStream.Pool ();
+
+        // Only use a user cache, the system cache probably contains all the Ubuntu components
+        appstream_pool.set_cache_flags (AppStream.CacheFlags.USE_USER);
+
+        // Clear out the default set of metadata locations and only use the folder that gets populated
+        // with elementary's AppStream data.
+        appstream_pool.clear_metadata_locations ();
+        appstream_pool.add_metadata_location ("/usr/share/app-info");
+
         // We don't want to show installed desktop files here
         appstream_pool.set_flags (appstream_pool.get_flags () & ~AppStream.PoolFlags.READ_DESKTOP_FILES);

The other thing we almost certainly want to do here is guard this with a meson option so Pop!_OS can easily disable this downstream, and other distros (where this will be less portable) can choose to disable it too.

[meisenzahl]

@davidmhewitt thanks for looking into this and providing a solution. I have modified my implementation based on your suggestion and guarded it with a meson option.

[cassidyjames]

It looks like this branch breaks the "More apps from…" footer at the bottom; at least in this branch, I no longer see apps from the same app developer, even when they are from Flathub.

[davidmhewitt]

Yeah, I wonder why 😆

appcenter/src/Core/FlatpakBackend.vala

Lines 369 to 371 in 0222a48

	public Gee.Collection<Package> get_packages_by_author (string author, int max) {
	return new Gee.ArrayList<Package> ();
	}