Adopting AppData in KDE?

[Sven Brauch]

On Sunday 03 November 2013 12:22:52 Richard Hughes wrote:
> This is what we've decided to do in GNOME, KDE is free to decide any policy
> it wants. We've decided that 500 high quality applications are better than
> 3000 broken ones.

Assuming KDE did that, then we would end up with a situation where you can't 
easily install Krita in distributions that ship GNOME, and you can't easily 
install Inkscape in distributions that ship KDE. That's a horrible situation, 
because a lot of people do that as of today. It would further widen the 
(technical) gap between the desktop environments, instead of encouraging 
people to select the best application for what they want to do regardless of 
what toolkit it uses (which I consider a somewhat idiotic criterion).
There would be lots of confused users in internet forums asking for why 
$application is not available any more, and we'd be sitting there explaining 
how to jump through hoops to still install it.
Thus I would claim that this is not an acceptable option.

Quality control should happen at the packager level. Broken applications 
should not be available in the distribution's main repository. And 
distributions should make the choice which application is good enough for 
their users, not a desktop environment. Besides, as said multiple times, this 
spec does not provide any kind of quality control worth mentioning anyways. 
The level of quality control it achieves is on par with looking at the date 
of the last commit in the repository.

For the same reasons, in my opinion, not showing packages in a package 
manager which don't provide screenshots because they don't look pretty is a 
bad choice. Of course this is your decision though.
In any case, it's a very bad precondition for discussing the new 
specification for the reasons Albert mentioned.

> I don't think _having_ an AppData
> file makes an application high quality, but we can probably say the
> opposite is true in about 2-3 years.
I don't see the point. Either it becomes so mainstream that you effectively 
need to have it; then every maintainer of a crappy application will just add 
it (to put it bluntly). Just imagine it would be part of an IDEs template for 
a new application -- nobody would not have it.
Or it does not become mainstream; then you will end up excluding a lot of 
high-quality applications for no reason (think e.g. Blender).

Greetings,
Sven