AppData Guidelines

[Richard Hughes]

On 2 June 2015 at 17:17, Gerald B. Cox <gbcox at bzb.us> wrote:
> Upstream response is if they are duplicated in the desktop file, then they
> aren't needed in the appdata file.

This is old advice and no longer true. One mistake I made when first
pushing AppStream was to fall back to the .desktop file Name= and
Comment= lines even with AppData. This was bad for two reasons:

* We can't validate the AppData file without the presence of the .desktop file
* We rarely want the same desktop comment and the one-line software
center summary; it can be and if it is then the translators don't have
to do any more work as it's extracted and deduplicated but ideally the
summary is a one line "sell line".
* It's a bit "magic" and makes things more complicated to explain

> The Fedora guidelines say to use "validate-relax", but rpmlint appears to
> use "validate".  Which
> is correct?  Is <name> and <summary> optional or required?

If i was to have my time again, I'd say required, but I don't want to
start ignoring AppData files that were once valid. Relaxed validation
is probably the right thing to do to also ignore the style guideline
which sometimes are false positives in some cases.

Richard.