Fwd: AppStream, Discover and metadata

Aleix Pol aleixpol at kde.org
Mon Nov 23 16:59:49 UTC 2015


Hi Debian KDE,
Most of the discussion also applies to Debian, I've been requested to
ask you as well.

Note that I created a branch called "qapt+appstream". Maybe somebody
can give it a go. If you don't want to fix PackageKit, that is.

Regards,
Aleix

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org>
Date: Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 5:45 PM
Subject: AppStream, Discover and metadata
To: Kubuntu Developer Discussion <kubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com>


Hi Kubuntu (and Debian KDE, that also applies there),
If you were at Akademy in Brno you might remember a guy blabbing on
about how important it was to adopt AppStream. That was me.

Now we have AppStream on Ubuntu, so I've been asking myself what's the
correct path to take. It's not entirely trivial to go forward, so I'd
like to know your opinion.

- Kubuntu 15.10 has Plasma 5.4. For this one we still use app-install data.
- Kubuntu 16.04 will use a future version of Plasma (either 5.5 or 5.6)

AFAIU, Ubuntu 16.04 is adopting Gnome Software as ultimate solution,
dropping their home-grown software. This means that those technologies
will probably be useful and properly supported there.

My proposal is to adopt PackageKit + AppStream as well (i.e.
Discover's PackageKit backend, that shares technology with Gnome
Software). This will allow us to drop quite some of our code while
keeping the same code that is already working on other platforms.
Sounds like a win-win.

This will require though some help on QA on the Kubuntu side and
assessment that no ultimately important features got lost in the way
(some will though).

As for Debian, using the QApt backend doesn't work there, since it
uses app-install which was deprecated some time ago.

An intermediate solution, if you guys don't love how PackageKit +
AppStream works on Kubuntu, would be to port the QApt backend to use
AppStream. This is already in a branch, but it's also untested and I
still think that using the same backend as the rest of the distros can
only be beneficial for all of us.

Feedback is very welcome.

Aleix



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