appdata questions

[Karel Volný]

Hi.

I have a few concerns about AppData that don't seem to be covered 
elsewhere, or at least I haven't found the answers
- not counting Richard's talk[1], as I gave up after five minutes, because 
I just couldn't get used to the accent ... sorry, I'm not native speaker, 
this was just too exhausting for me (plus I'm not exactly happy about 
having to spend time listening to 99% of sauce to get to 1% of information 
I'm interested in)

I've put those concerns onto the ticket[2] but the only answer I got was 
that it is wrong communication channel, so I'm copying it here:


1) Why not to take the information from the .desktop file by default and 
use appdata.xml only if the author/packager wants to provide additional 
information that cannot be in the .desktop file?

2) What is it good for to install appdata.xml into %{_datadir}/appdata/ 
when the installer (Apper, GNOME Software) takes the information from 
/usr/share/app-info/xmls so the files in /usr/share/appdata/ will lay on 
end-users' systems completely unused?

3) Almost the same goes for icons, if appstream-data will copy icons to 
/usr/share/app-info/icons, why to have two copies of the same image?

4) from ​http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/appdata/

> What happens if I don't ship this file?
> 
> The GNOME Software Center currently shows a nag message that the upstream
> project doesn't ship the additional data. Additionally, we will penalize
> apps that do not ship the extra metadata by showing them lower in the 
search
> results.

why do we penalize users by hiding contents from them when some upstream 
just doesn't care about this stuff? (see also comment 7 about the "unjust 
burden")?

5) If there is a trend to split localised information into separate 
langpacks, why to mix all locales into one file, not allowing any split?

Also, no localised screenshots allowed - "Screenshots should be taken with 
US English as the display language." - even if they could be tagged with 
language code too?

6) If we copy the screenshots, why not to provide them also in an optional 
package?

I've heard there are still some people who don't have Internet connection 
and install Fedora from DVD (do we still allow to install more packages 
from DVD after the initial install, right?) Or some may prefer not to get 
online just to browse the applications list ...


- TIA for the answers,
K.


[1] ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSWIodEQMqo

[2] https://fedorahosted.org/fpc/ticket/414#comment:31

-- 
Karel Volný
QE BaseOs/Daemons Team
Red Hat Czech, Brno
tel. +420 532294274
(RH: +420 532294111 ext. 8262074)
xmpp kavol at jabber.cz
:: "Never attribute to malice what can
::  easily be explained by stupidity."