[Feature Request] App Store, Marketplace, or Package Manager for ArozOS

[Secarian]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
A lack of a centralized platform for managing and accessing applications in ArozOS.

Describe the solution you'd like
A centralized platform, such as an App Store, Marketplace, or Package Manager, that allows users to easily search, install, and manage applications in ArozOS.

Describe alternatives you've considered
An alternative solution could be manual downloading and installation of applications, but this is not user-friendly and increases the risk of downloading potentially unsafe or malicious applications.

Additional context
A centralized platform for managing and accessing applications in ArozOS can improve user experience, increase developer participation, enhance security, and increase scalability by making it easier for future developers to add and manage their applications.
Additional suggestion
Include a tool for creating and verifying entries and mark them in the App Store, Marketplace, or Package Manager based on public repositories, ideally utilizing the description from the README.md file of the repositorie. This would increase the reliability and trustworthiness of the platform, making it easier for users to find high-quality, verified applications.

[neonspectra]

IMO, the feature that allows installing a module via Git repository is a super solid basis for a package management solution, but of course the limitation here is that users can only install individual packages that they already know about rather than browsing a curated list of available packages

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My idea for how to implement a package manager without significant overhead would be to add a sort of standard scheme for a kind of "meta-repository" which contains links to other Git repositories with WebApp Modules ready for install.

For the purpose of this comment, I'm going to refer to this fictional idea as "ArozOS Meta Repositories".

Some benefits of this way to implement it:

• Developers who have created a WebApp Module just have to submit a PR to the official ArozOS Meta Repository with a link to their Git repository for their module. This reduces friction for developers because they don't have to do any extra work or maintain a separate ArozOS App Store page outside of their WebApp Module's Git repo in order to redistribute their module.
• The ArozOS Meta Repositories would itself be fully version controlled
• Administrators could easily fork the official ArozOS Meta Repository to create their own self-hosted self-curated app stores if they don't want to use the default one in their own hosted ArozOS instance.
  • This means that ArozOS Meta Repositories could be decentralised, meaning that they could continue to be maintained by the community in forks if the project were ever disbanded.

Some cons of implementing it this way:

• Having modular app stores risks turning into something like "PPA Hell", to use an example from Ubuntu land. You potentially run into a situation where there are a million (potentially conflicting) user-hosted Meta Repositories for random shit.
• Someone has to review and accept PRs for any ArozOS Meta Repository that gets stood up somewhere. But, in basically any app store / package manager model you need someone to review submissions anyway. This is not significantly different.

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Using Git / GitHub as a backend for package management is actually not unheard of in the wild, and has proven to be a pretty robust way of distributing packages. It seems like it would also play very well into the cloud-native git-focused ethos in ArozOS.

A good example of an existing OS that does this is NixOS, which has its official package repository stored over on NixOS/nixpkgs. Nixpkgs stores entire packages, which is a bit different from my "Meta Repositories" suggestion where only links are stored. But the point of using Git for a robust package management backend being a proven solution should stand.