Heads up; F22 will require applications to ship appdata to be listed in software center

[Richard Hughes]

Hi,

As the subject suggests, Fedora 22 will require applications to have a
long description to be shown in the software center. We're introducing
this change so that we can show a powerful application full of
high-quality content, rather than what we have now which is a equal
mixture of awesome and sadness.

If you're interested you can see the number of applications with
appdata without installing gnome-software from rawhide here:
http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/screenshots/f21/status.html
(warning; huge generated HTML file).

A lot of unmaintained or unloved applications will be removed (which
is a totally good thing, we don't want new users choosing buggy and
crashy apps), but there are also a lot of applications there that we
probably want to save. Note that I don't want the packages removed
from Fedora; users can still use the command line to install them,
just not show them in the 'Software' GUI.

"Saving" an application (so that it still appears in the software
center) is just a matter of either:

 * Convincing upstream to ship and install an appdata file
 * Installing an appdata file from the Fedora package into
/usr/share/appdata (if upstream is dead / unwilling to add the file)

I've written a bit about the AppData status on my blog,
http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2014/01/22/appdata-status-for-january/
and so far over 200 applications ship AppData in Fedora 21. That's a
long way from what I'd like to see, but it's going up at about 1% per
month, which is encouraging.

KDE/XFCE doesn't ship gnome-software - however Apper does parse the
appdata in KDE, and we also want to show awesome KDE/XFCE applications
in gnome-software so this really applies distro-wide.

Comments welcome, thanks.

Richard