Would XFCE consider adopting MetaInfo?. Part 2. Plugins for Apps.

[Simon Steinbeiß]

Hey Igor,

On Sun, 15 Jun 2014 20:28:48 +0400
Igor Gnatenko <i.gnatenko.brain at gmail.com> wrote:

> some times ago Richard Hughes already asked you about including AppData
> to Xfce applications[0]. I don't know what happened there. Only know
> that parole now has AppData.

Support for it was added to a few other apps as well (e.g. xfce4-power-manager). Just follow the thread to know what happened there :)

> I think it's time to propose new feature for your projects!

Phew, you obviously haven't been following the development pace of Xfce. As you mention yourself, even AppData hasn't been added to all components, so I'm really not sure whether "it's time to propose a new feature".
</sarcasm>

> Recently Richard Hughes added the addon component type to AppStream[1]
> which is an XML standard that is used by distributors such as Fedora,
> Suse and soon to be Arch and Debian to create metadata for various
> software center applications.
> 
> By creating a metainfo.xml for each plugin, these are then shown next to
> the main desktop application and allow the user to easily install extra
> components. Sure, it can be translated. I think more better if they will
> be translated.
> 
> Richard written a blog post[2] about what upstream needs to do to
> integrate with the KDE and GNOME software centers, and we are really
> appreciate any feedback and help at this stage.
> 
> Your have lots of plugins for thunar, parole, etc. Having all of them in
> software centers would be good.

That is partly up to packagers I guess. For example Parole usually has its plugins as part of the main package (note: there are no 3rd party plugins for it atm).
If you go through the list of Xfce apps that seem to be viable for AppData, you'll see that not many of them have plugins [0].

In general, there only seem to be 3 to me where it *could* make sense: Parole, Thunar and xfce4-power-manager.

> While I was writing this text, I looked for some of repos in
> git.xfce.org and found two or something like this number of AppData. Are
> you have any problems with it?

I guess we don't (if you follow the thread you linked to, you'll see that Richard validated one of our XMLs), but we're waiting for Software Centers to tell us whether there are problems with it.

As Xfce is very low on manpower right now, I don't know how long it'll take for all the components mentioned before [0] to get AppData-support. I guess as metainfo is even a step further, it'll be even a bit further down the road.
I'm happy to receive patches though for the components I'm working on (Parole, xfce4-power-manager)!

Cheers
Simon


[0] https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/2014-May/030730.html