PROPOSAL: Make AppData files mandatory for applications shown in the software center

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Thu, Nov 06, 2014 at 10:03:08AM +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> It will come as no surprise to many of you, but I'm going to propose
> that we only show applications in the software center in F22 when they
> have an AppData file. At the moment nearly 50% of applications in
> Fedora 21 ship AppData files, and the ones left over are not exactly
> the award winning ones, if you know what I mean. We want the software
> center to be a showcase of all the awesome applications available on
> Fedora, not just a wrapper around a package installer.
I agree with the proposal, with one caveat: some of the packages that
do not have appdata files are fairly important and popular packages,
but do not have appdata files because they are developed externally,
and do not follow the developments that gnome is spearheading.

>From the list:
- emacs
- various kde applications
- sagemath
- yakuake

I think that emacs is already fixed / being fixed upstream, but even if it
wasn't, not presenting it in gnome-software seems like a bad idea from
the view of the whole distribution.

So, I think your proposal should be amended with the a list kept
somewhere on a wiki of applications which must get appdata, and treat
this list as blocking for this feature. This list would include
applications that are "widely used", which people could extend after
providing a short justification. I hope we can agree that emacs falls
onto this list, but lshw-gui does not.

Zbyszek