Shipping package metadata in a package

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 10:01:09AM +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> The downside to shipping prepared
> metadata is that the package size is larger, and that the metadata
> would be *very* out of date after a year or so.
I don't see the problem with stale metadata of this kind. It's not like
a description or screenshots of a GUI application are completely outdated
after a year. There are exceptions, but most of the time, Fedora wouldn't
even update the package in a certain release if the underlying toolkit
changes or significant new functionality is added. So for packages which
were in the initial release of given Fedora version, slightly stale metadata
shouldn't be an issue. For packages which were added during the release,
the metadata might be missing. But then they would be downloaded during
the update... Of course this is all true in the "stable limit", where
packages have their appdata. This might take a release or two to reach
this point. If you're trying to solve the problem for the *next* release,
that might be different. But probably improving the metadata files and
adding screenshots so everything is there is a better use of time in
the long run than adding a way to download updates faster.

BTW. Reminded by this thread, I've added appdata files for the calibre
package. In the appdata file I have a screenshot:
  <screenshot type="default" width="1200" height="675">http://in.waw.pl/~zbyszek/calibre/calibre-main-window.png</screenshot>
but gnome-software doesn't display it, despite displaying the textual
content of the appdata file just fine. appdata-validate also doesn't complain.
AFAICT, there's nothing wrong with this picture, the download works, etc. 
Any pointers?

Zbyszek