PROPOSAL: Make AppData files mandatory for applications shown in the software center

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 9:41 AM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
<zbyszek at in.waw.pl> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 06, 2014 at 10:03:08AM +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> It will come as no surprise to many of you, but I'm going to propose
>> that we only show applications in the software center in F22 when they
>> have an AppData file. At the moment nearly 50% of applications in
>> Fedora 21 ship AppData files, and the ones left over are not exactly
>> the award winning ones, if you know what I mean. We want the software
>> center to be a showcase of all the awesome applications available on
>> Fedora, not just a wrapper around a package installer.
> I agree with the proposal, with one caveat: some of the packages that
> do not have appdata files are fairly important and popular packages,
> but do not have appdata files because they are developed externally,
> and do not follow the developments that gnome is spearheading.
>
> From the list:
> - emacs
> - various kde applications
> - sagemath
> - yakuake
>
> I think that emacs is already fixed / being fixed upstream, but even if it
> wasn't, not presenting it in gnome-software seems like a bad idea from
> the view of the whole distribution.
>
> So, I think your proposal should be amended with the a list kept
> somewhere on a wiki of applications which must get appdata, and treat
> this list as blocking for this feature. This list would include
> applications that are "widely used", which people could extend after
> providing a short justification. I hope we can agree that emacs falls
> onto this list, but lshw-gui does not.

Why wouldn't we (Fedora) add an AppData file to the package ourselves
for such exceptions?

josh