Would XFCE consider adopting AppData?

[Richard Hughes]

Hi all,

My name is Richard Hughes, and I'm the main developer of GNOME
Software. I'm also one of the people behind the AppData and AppStream
initiatives, which are cross desktop, cross distro specifications for
metadata used by software installers. So far Fedora and Suse are
shipping AppStream metadata, and Arch and Debian have committed
resources too. 70% of all GNOME software packaged in Fedora ships an
AppData file already, and KDE has just announced that over 100 of the
KDE apps will get AppData and translations too automatically. This
leaves XFCE currently with 0%.

What AppStream requires is upstream metadata, things like search
keywords, a long description of the application and some screenshots
people can look at before deciding to install an application. There
are quite a few applications that I use as a GNOME developer from the
XFCE project, and it would be awesome to see the XFCE apps featured as
first-class citizens in GNOME Software on GNOME, and Apper on KDE. It
would also make implementing an XFCE software center much easier in
the future.

There is both a stick and a carrot for applications writing AppData
files. The carrot is they get an extra "star" in the software centers
for long descriptions, and an extra star for shipping screenshots,
which also means they feature higher up in the search results. The
stick is that from Fedora 22 onwards, we'll not be showing
applications *without* AppData files, which is thankfully a long time
from now.

So, if you're an upstream developer I would love you to read
http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/appdata/ and commit a file
upstream. If you're a contributor, please raise awareness of AppData
to your affiliated project and hopefully for 4.12 we can have lots of
high-quality XFCE applications visible to other desktops.

If you've got any questions, concerns or flames, please either reply
to this email or find me on twitter. I'm "hughsie" on GIMPNet and
Freenode.

Thanks,

Richard.