#286 Please create an AppData file for Pioneers

[Richard Hughes]

Please consider writing and installing an AppData file with the application description and some screenshots, else Pioneers looks really bad in the GNOME and KDE Software Centers. We'd love to showcase more applications, but without the extra data file we can't. See http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/appdata/ for details; thanks!

Richard

[Richard Hughes]

Please consider improving and installing this AppData file we wrote: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hughsie/fedora-appstream/master/appdata-extra/desktop/pioneers.appdata.xml

The AppData file needs to be installed to /usr/share/appdata/ on Linux and the basename needs to match the .desktop basename. It would also be great if you could integrate the file with your translation system (e.g. intltool) to make the descriptions translated.

[Roland Clobus]

Thanks for the file.

I took a look at the website http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/appdata, but apart from the syntax, I could not find exactly which program I should use to test whether the xml-file was installed and processed correctly.

I am running Gnome on Debian Testing. I did look for baobab, which has an AppData file installed on my system. I tried the following tools, but neither showed e.g. the license information: Packages (gpk-application) and Synapic (synaptic). The tool that you mention (GNOME Software Center) is either not installed (yet) on my computer, or I cannot find it.

Could you tell me which tool to use to review the AppData file?

[Richard Hughes]

You can use "appstream-util validate prioneers.appdata.xml" to validate it, unfortunately Debian doesn't (yet) ship gnome-software although the build build masters are enabling appstream support some time in the next few weeks. Apper might install on Debian, but I don't think it uses the installed AppData files (only the AppStream metadata)just yet.

[Roland Clobus]

On Debian I've found 'appdata-tools' v0.1.7.
That version rejects the '<metadata_license>'-tag and requires the older '<license>'-tag.

I've downloaded Fedora 20 Live with appdata-tools v0.1.8
That version requires an additional '<updatecontact>'-tag and requires a second '<p>'-tag in the description.
Apparently 'gnome-software' uses the data from /usr/share/app-info/xmls/fedora-20.xml.gz. I did install Pioneers and restarted 'gnome-software' and could not find pioneers anymore (I entered 'pioneers' in the search bar), only the server (with the text 'installed') and the metaserver were shown.

I've also downloaded Fedore 21 Workstation.
That has an empty Software: 'No Application Data Found', except when I run it as root.

I would guess that v0.1.8 is the best version to use.
I would like to see how the other tags (license, screenshots) will be shown.

[Richard Hughes]

appdata-tools-0.1.7 is very old. Upstream I've deprecated appdata-tools and most people are now using appstream-util as this works with all aspects of the AppStream specification[1]. If you want to test the appdata file, the best way is to copy the appdata into /usr/share/appdata/ and use Fedora 21, or at least something that ships gnome-software 3.12 or higher (e.g. Arch or Suse). I've attached a screenshot of what it looks like to me in the software center as shipped in Fedora 21.

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/