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

[Nate Graham]

On 10/23/23 12:46, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> 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
> 


Thanks for the extra info, Matthias!

While I have you here, where should the contents of 
/usr/share/app-info/icons/ be relocated to? This is where Fedora puts 
downloaded app icons, and I wasn't able to find where the documentation 
says they should be moved to.

Nate