Comment 26 for bug 645300

(In reply to comment #23)
> We're talking about 80-150MB in roughly 2000 files, iirc. The mirrors can soak
> that up. And having an index file you grab from the repodata is just like
> things we already have.

So, the user launches add/remove software, and searches for "office".

1. The desktop metadata gets downloaded (few Mb)
2. The results get shown with icon-missing (14)
3. PackageKit instructs yum to download icon data for 14 packages
4. The icons get downloaded by yum
5. Add / remove software updates the icons with the new themed icons

Now, compare that to the Ubuntu add/remove experience:

1. The results are shown with the correct icons, near instantly

Now we need the desktop metadata in one file so we can perform searching on the file (like searching for 'office' in Hungarian) and because we want to get results instantaneously. I would argue we need the icons included in the metadata file as we want to show the icons with the search results as they appear.

The fact that Suse and Ubuntu want to share a common spec on this really makes integrating it so deeply with the Fedora repo metadata and yum core a bitter pill to swallow.