Curating the metadata in the Software application

[Richard Hughes]

On 27 June 2014 17:59, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro at gnome.org> wrote:
> Appdata Complaint #1: I've found it very difficult to take good
> screenshots for my applications (the GNOME games). Most are intended to
> run in small windows, and do not look good when resized to 16:9. Some
> are unresizable. And Richard's screenshot window sizer extension is
> broken for apps with header bars, so my screenshots aren't even at
> appropriate sizes. I want to do better, but I'm not sure how.

I think without making the details page in gnome-software resize and
reflow (which we don't really want to do) we really have to ask for
16:9 screenshots. I'm sure we can work on the padding+resizing
algorithm, as that does some pretty brain-dead things (like resizing a
760x431 image to 752x423) sometimes.

> Appdata Complaint #2: There's no standard on when to use the
> <project_name> tag.

This is what we've been working on
http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/sect-Metadata-Application.html
-- it's for version 0.7 of the spec, but applies equally well on older
versions.

> I use it for games with generic names, so that the
> software center displays "GNOME Chess" rather than simply "Chess," but
> other apps with generic names do not use it.

You mean <name> then, not <project_name>. What I would do in this case
is have "Chess" as the name in the .desktop file, and "GNOME Chess" in
the AppData file.

> Appdata Compliant #3: The <project_group> tag is also not used
> consistently. I'm not sure how many GNOME apps actually declare
> themselves to be in the GNOME project group.

Right, the metadata extractor uses a few different heuristics[1] to
try and set the <project_group> if not already set as this is very
important so that we prioritize GNOME apps on GNOME, and KDE apps in
KDE. We've actually added a <project_name> tag if you want to show
something translatable in the software center, e.g. "The GNOME Chess
Developers" rather than falling back to the untranslated
<project_group>.

Richard

[1] https://github.com/hughsie/appstream-glib/blob/master/libappstream-builder/plugins/asb-plugin-hardcoded.c#L58