Heads-up about AppStream 1.0 no longer honoring legacy metadata locations

[Matthias Klumpp]

Hi everyone!

Am Mo., 23. Okt. 2023 um 18:02 Uhr schrieb Nate Graham <nate at kde.org>:
>
> Hello folks!
>
> Plasma 6 will require AppStream 1.0, which we just discovered no longer
> honors legacy metadata locations, including
> /usr/share/app-info/(xml|xmls) and /var/lib/app-info/(xml|xmls). If your
> distro is currently storing metadata in one of these locations, it needs
> to be moved to /usr/share/swcatalog/xml or /var/lib/swcatalog/xml. Icons
> also need to move.
>
> If this migration is not performed, Discover in Plasma 6 will not be
> able to see any of your distro's apps.
>
> See
> https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-CatalogData.html#spec-asxml-filenaming
> for more information.

Some additions to that which might be helpful: AppStream 1.0 is
currently not yet released, and the new location has been fully
supported since AppStream 0.15.2 (and partially before that). So if
you have any higher version than that, you can easily switch.
If your distribution is Debian-based (12/bookworm or higher) you will
not need to do anything and that switch has happened automatically
already.

Versions from the AppStream 0.16.x stable series and below support
both locations and will do so forever.
AppStream 1.0 will be released early next month.
The 1.0 release will also drop support for the /usr/share/appdata
location that has been deprecated for 7 years already, so in case you
have any MetaInfo files in there, please move them to
/usr/share/metainfo and also validate them with appstreamcli (just in
case there's some old markup that needs upgrading).
The 1.0 release also breaks API/ABI of its Qt and GLib libraries, but
is coinstallable without issues with the previous 0.16.x release.

Cheers,
    Matthias

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