[Bf-committers] Linus AppStream

[Sergey Sharybin]

Hi,

Today we've been poke din IRC about adding appdata for blender to our git
repository. Briefly, this appdata is a XML file which is used by package
inallation software on linux to provide such an information as description,
screenshots versions and so before downloading the package even.

The original proposal is to add this [1] to our git repo. But i don't
really like this idea, mainly because this file is to be translated (and if
it's not, then it's not that helpful imo). I'm also not a fan of adding it
now and solving translation later -- this gonna to frustrate package
maintainers for all the distros.

So my proposal is:

- We store "blender.appdata.xml.in" in our main repository. This file would
be a "template" which wouldn't have actual description in it
- In the translation repository we'll have a folder with files like
"blender.appdata.{nl,es,ru,fr...}.txt" which would contain actual snippet
of the xml corresponding to a translated description. Those files will come
from translation branches. Maintaining them is easy (actually, you write
them once and likely never changes) and translation team handles them.
- Using the stuff above, .in file will be generated to actual xml for each
language and stored to build_folder/appstream.
- I'll vote for keeping appdata xml as small as possible, for sure without
any distro-specific fields/information. If some distro needs to put more
info, it's up to packages to create a patch for this and keep it as a part
of packaging process.

It's the easiest way to support this thing in a rather nice way, which
hopefully wouldn't require extra work from neither us not from distro
maintainers. If it's getting approved, there's some concerns about current
appdata xml:

- Think we need name and project_license ?
- I'm not sure about metadata license, but this i'd better leave to Ton.
- Screenshots are to be corrected imo, current ones shows more like work
done in blender, none of them shows blender itself.

Any comments? Matteo, Richard?

[1]
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hughsie/fedora-appstream/master/appdata-extra/desktop/blender.appdata.xml

-- 
With best regards, Sergey Sharybin