Yesterday I released version 0.8 of AppStream, the cross-distribution standard for software metadata, that is currently used by GNOME-Software, Muon and Apper in to display rich metadata about applications and other software components.
What’s new?
The new release contains some tweaks on AppStreams documentation, and extends the specification with a few more tags and refinements. For example we now recommend sizes for screenshots. The recommended sizes are the ones GNOME-Software already uses today, and it is a good idea to ship those to make software-centers look great, as others SCs are planning to use them as well. Normal sizes as well as sizes for HiDPI displays are defined. This change affects only the distribution-generated data, the upstream metadata is unaffected by this (the distro-specific metadata generator will resize the screenshots anyway).
Another addition to the spec is the introduction of an optional <source_pkgname/> tag, which holds the source package name the packages defined in <pkgname/> tags are built from. This is mainly for internal use by the distributor, e.g. it can decide to use this information to link to internal resources (like bugtrackers, package-watch etc.). It may also be used by software-center applications as additional information to group software components.
Furthermore, we introduced a <bundle/> tag for future use with 3rd-party application installation solutions. The tag notifies a software-installer about the presence of a 3rd-party application bundle, and provides the necessary information on how to install it. In order to do that, the software-center needs to support the respective installation solution. Currently, the Limba project and Xdg-App bundles are supported. For software managers, it is a good idea to implement support for 3rd-party app installers, as soon as the solutions are ready. Currently, the projects are worked on heavily. The new tag is currently already used by Limba, which is the reason why it depends on the latest AppStream release.
How do I get it?
All AppStream libraries, libappstream, libappstream-qt and libappstream-glib, are supporting the 0.8 specification in their latest version – so in case you are using one of these, you don’t need to do anything. For Debian, the DEP-11 spec is being updated at time, and the changes will land in the DEP-11 tools soon.
Improve your metadata!
This call goes especilly to many KDE projects! Getting good data is partly a task for the distributor, since packaging issues can result in incorrect or broken data, screenshots need to be properly resized etc. However, flawed upstream data can also prevent software from being shown, since software with broken data or missing data will not be incorporated in the distro XML AppStream data file.
Richard Hughes of Fedora has created a nice overview of software failing to be included. You can see the failed-list here – the data can be filtered by desktop environment etc. For KDE projects, a Comment= field is often missing in their .desktop files (or a <summary/> tag needs to be added to their AppStream upstream XML file). Keep in mind that you are not only helping Fedora by fixing these issues, but also all other distributions cosuming the metadata you ship upstream.
For Debian, we will have a similar overview soon, since it is also a very helpful tool to find packaging issues.
If you want to get more information on how to improve your upstream metadata, and how new metadata should look like, take a look at the quickstart guide in the AppStream documentation.