I have been to a Cross-distro Meeting on Application Installer which to the best of our knowledge is also the first one of its kind. Credit goes to Vincent Untz for organising it, to OpenSUSE for hosting it and to the various sponsors for getting us there.
It went surprisingly well. We got along, got stuff done, did as much work as possible to agree on as many formats, protocols and technologies as we possibly could.
The timing of it is very important, as most major distros would like to adopt some of the features that just became popular in the various new app markets and stores, such as screenshots, user comments and ratings. It looks like a lot of new code is about to be written, or a lot of existing code is about to gain quite a bit of popularity.
For my part, I presented the work on Debtags and apt-xapian-index.
With regards to Debtags, other distros seem to be missing a compehensive classification system, and Debtags is, well, it.
With regards to apt-xapian-index, we just noticed that it's the perfect back-end for what everyone would like to do, and the index structure is rather distribution-agnostic, and it's been road-tested with considerable success by at least software-center, so it attracted quite a bit of interest, and will likely attract some more.
Just to prove a point I put together [[a prototype webby markety appy thing|pkgshelf]] in just a few hours of work.
The meeting was also the ideal place to create a joint effort to [[match package names across distributions|distromatch]], which means that a lot of things that were hard to share before, such as screenshots, tags and patches, are suddenly not hard to share anymore.