Hi all. I'm the developer for PackageKit and gnome-software, the latter being the new software center we're hopefully including as a technical preview in Fedora 20. A few years ago distributions came together and created the AppStream specification which was designed to be common between all distributions and desktops. This data allowed us to describe applications that were not yet installed, and also map them to package names. The AppStream specification also allows us to include icons for applications. Ubuntu and SuSE both adopted the standard, but for many reasons Fedora didn't until now. With this data means we can create a software center that looks as good as the Chrome/Firefox store, but with all the existing applications we have available to us in Fedora. It means we can give people the software center they've been requesting for years. We're not taking away yum/dnf/gnome-packagekit or any of the existing tools that focus on packages, just adding a *new* application installer. At the moment, we use the information in the .desktop file to populate the AppStream data, but this is missing a few core things, for instance a long description, the upstream website for the application and any screenshots to show. All of the three being quite critical to assess an application before installing. To fix this I've created a tiny AppData specification [1] which is a subset of the AppStream specification. It's designed as a way to describe the application (not the package) so that data can be used in the AppStream data. At the moment, about 50 upstream projects are already shipping AppData files, and we've also got a few more which live in the fedora compose tools repo [2] for 'featured' applications we want to look complete for Fedora 20 launch. All the files in this repo have been submitted upstream, so hopefully the number of "extra" files in that repo should shrink to zero long term. So, well done if you've read this far already. What I am asking all you packagers for applications to do is: * Talk to the upstream maintainers, and try to convince them to write and ship an .appdata.xml file -- this is the best option as it can be translated in the future upstream, and the upstream maintainer can control things like what screenshots are shipped. It also means the data is shared with all the other distros. * If your upstream is on life-support, dead, or just not interested in shipping yet another file in the tarball you have two options. Either ship an AppData file in the package itself, e.g. as a "Source2" and install it in /usr/share/appdata in the RPM. If you do a build for f20 and make sure it's in before the F20 Beta then I'll automatically be included in gnome-software. The other option is to submit a patch against fedora-appstream itself, although I'd much prefer it in the package as then you can make changes yourself if the project description/screenshot changes. In the context of AppStream, an application is a package that ships one or more .desktop files, that include Name,Comment and also Icon. A few applications are blacklisted if they are not included in the GUI menus or if they are settings panels. For now it's quite restrictive, but in the future we'll be considering other things as apps too, like Chrome Store Apps and GNOME Shell Extensions. Any questions, either grab me on irc 'hughsie' or reply to this email. Be sure to read [1] as a lot of common questions are answered there. Thanks in advance! Richard [1] http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/appdata/ [2] https://github.com/hughsie/fedora-appstream/tree/master/appdata-extra -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
