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hi all I'd like to help improve two key areas of fedora and by extension, gnome. They both have to do with appstream, which is, I think, what gnome software uses to display metadata about a package, license, description, etc. The first is the data itself. Some packages are missing the metadata. The second has to do with handling of unknown mime types. Whenever the system comes up with a file type it can't handle it opens up gnome software to install something that can handle that type. Usually this results in a generic "unfortunately, we couldn't find anything to handle this type" message. I'd like to fix this. I'm just not sure how this works. Looking in my appstream data in /usr/share/appdata, I see that some applications have two files. applicationName.appdata.xml, which is the metadata, license, description, etc. And appName.metainfo.xml, which looks like what I'm looking for. Would it be at all possible to parse the .desktop file for applications and extract the mime type data from there? This would improve the accuracy significantly since most desktop files say what mime types they can handle. We could then use the data to generate either an appstream file or a metainfo file. This might not need much work, all it would need would be changes to appstream-builder and possibly either an extension to the freedesktop desktop file standard or adding extra tags, something like x-license="license" and x-description="description". Sorry if I'm getting a little technical. I'm also trying to figure out how gnome software finds applications when typed into the search field. Most of the time, typing in an application name results in a "no application found" message, even though that app is indeed available. Is this related to the appstream data again? Or is there something else? A good example is orca, the screen reader. Type orca into gnome software and you'll get an error message. I hope this isn't the wrong place to write this, but it was the only one I could think of. Thanks for reading Kendell clark
desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org
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kendell clark