[kde-community] Our new project metadata system

[Aleix Pol]

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 3:13 PM, Boudhayan Gupta <bgupta at kde.org> wrote:
> On 1 April 2016 at 17:58, Thomas Pfeiffer <thomas.pfeiffer at kde.org> wrote:
>> On Freitag, 1. April 2016 21:54:10 CEST Ben Cooksley wrote:
>>
>>> Out of curiosity, how are the Appstream files accessed by tools such
>>> as the various app centers?
>>> I presume some kind of repository exists?
>>
>> Nope, actually distributions extract the appstream data from the source code
>> of each application and generate their own AppStream database.
>>
>>> If so, it may be worth pulling the information you need Boudhayan from
>>> such a repository ( although the indexing process will undoubtedly
>>> require either source code checkouts or compiled code, in which case
>>> we'll probably have to use what the CI system has and pick a branch
>>> group to represent - probably stable-kf5-qt5. More details on this
>>> would be nice )
>
> I was looking at the AppStream XML files and it has all the data I
> need, even the translations. I can use that.
>
> We could run a nightly job to pull in AppStream data from the repos
> and keep it in a place the apps website code can access. Keeping it in
> a standard place in the repo (say at the root) is probably a very good
> idea.
>
>> We could theoretically just tap into a distribution's AppStream database if
>> that makes our lives easier, or just reuse their code to extract the data and
>> create the database.
>
> Using distributions' databases mean we don't have control over the
> infra for our website. I don't think we can have that.

You don't need the distribution database, because they will add
information you don't need.

A way to get all the files is to look into
$PREFIX/share/appdata/*.appdata.xml. Maybe this can be extracted from
build.kde.org.

Aleix