Would XFCE consider adopting AppData?

[Simon Steinbeiß]

On Wed, 21 May 2014 10:43:03 +0100
Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:

> Some initial points:
> 
> * http://http:// in the first screenshot

Will be fixed once there are good screenshots (see below).

> * You want to use <_p> and </_p> if you're going to use intltool to
> translate those files. The underscore just marks the tags for
> translation and means they end up in the .po files.

Thanks, done!

> * Are those screenshots both 16:9 aspect ratio?

The screenshots are currently placeholders. I think we'll take new ones in proper format/resolution and put them in the git repository.

> * <release version="0.6.1" timestamp="20140330"> -- the timestamp is
> supposed to be a UNIX epoch

Done.

> * The descriptions of the releases are supposed to be translated prose
> the users can understand, so less of "<p>Latest stable release, see:
> http://some-obscure-URL</p>" more of "<_p>This release brings
> improvements to the MPRIS plugin, fixes a few crashers when running on
> ARM12 hardware and adds the ability to transcode FLV files.</_p>"

Done.

> If you use appdata-validate --strict from the appdata-tools project
> you can catch some of these problems.

E: Unable to locate package appdata-tools
Obviously this hasn't been packaged yet for Ubuntu ;-)

> This is for mere-mortal users, things like git URLs are black magic :)
> -- Aim for the non-technical user -- I always write this kind of stuff
> with my dad in mind, i.e. he's not an idiot and knows how to use an
> application, but he doesn't care about sonames being bumped and what
> internal interfaces are doing.

Ok, I guess this is something that cannot be automated/scripted then. Release notes are typically too lengthy and technical for $my_dad, so these brief descriptions will have to be written for each release by hand I guess.

> Right. In gnome we just point that at the gitweb server we have. What
> distros are supposed to do (and what Fedora does) is download the
> images *once* to a cache and then only re-download them if the URL
> changes. Then in the case of Fedora we convert all the screenshots to
> PNG, pad with alpha to the 16:9 aspect then upload to
> http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/screenshots/ -- it wouldn't be
> fair to hit the upstream project with thousands of new requests for
> large images, and could also be a privacy issue.

Ok, guess we'll try the same (see above).

> > Last but not least (and you'll notice that when reviewing anyway), there are some differences between these two specifications
> >  * http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/sect-Metadata-Application.html
> >  * http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/appdata/
> > Which one is accurate (and why are they different in the first place)?
> 
> The second is the "old" specification, which is what I've been pushing
> for a couple of years now. Slowly the former is superseding the old
> format, but any applications that don't understand the new schema only
> support the old one. I've worked with Matthias on the new spec, so
> that's why it's mostly a super-set of what I did originally. When
> applications like GNOME Software 3.10.x are EOL then I'll retire my
> page and point everyone to the new spec. The old spec I'll basically
> have to support forever, which is fine. Given that XFCE doesn't have
> any legacy apps to support, I'd say go for the new format rather than
> the old one. From GNOME 3.12 onwards we support either format when
> parsing and generating distro metadata.

Phew, then I based my sample on the correct one at least ;)

I've pushed my updates to the branch, apart from the screenshots things should be correct now. If you spot more trouble, let me know!

Cheers
Simon