Bug#1057848: game-data-packager: generate AppStream XML from yaml definition

[Simon McVittie]

On Sat, 09 Dec 2023 at 16:41:13 +0100, Alexandre Detiste wrote:
> For games with a 1:1 relationsheep between the free engine
> and non-free data, an autogenerated .xml might
> of little value or even annoying.
> 
> But it could be of great use for a generic engine like ScummVM.
> 
> Of course everything is in the details ...

I'm not sure that Appstream is going to be particularly useful for g-d-p:
it's primarily for app-store style interfaces (GNOME Software, KDE Discover
and similar), which are not really applicable for g-d-p-supported games
because almost by definition you can't just `apt install` them.

If we do generate Appstream XML or any similar resource, I think
we should learn our lesson from scummvm's .desktop files (in which
we effectively can't fix bugs), and seriously consider using the
same pattern as ut99's .desktop file instead: put the real file in
/usr/share/games/game-data-packager-runtime, and a symlink in the
generated package to get it onto the search path.

That won't be any use for DEP-11 metadata (if our users put the
non-redistributable g-d-p-generated .deb in an apt repo to share it
between their computers, appstream-generator won't be able to extract
the XML and turn it into a DEP-11 index) but that seems quite a niche
use-case for g-d-p anyway?

    smcv