Pushing AppStream upstream metadata to KDE repositories...?

Matthias Klumpp matthias at tenstral.net
Sat May 10 18:02:20 BST 2014


Hi there!
I asked this a week ago, but just got individual replies from two
people who didn't want changes made to their Git master branches
currently (not an issue, we handled that via pull-requests and
reviewboard).
So I wrote this follow-up, which might be a bit more visible ;-)

Now that we got translations for AppStream upstream metadata working
(see [1] for an example), the next step is to write metadata for KDE projects.
I already started with that, partially auto-generating AppStream data
from our project metadata service (the generated files still need some
work afterwards, but it's better than nothing)
I initially thought to send every new metadata through Reviewboard, in
order to make it visible for the maintainers, who might want to change
the project's description.
However, for 160+ files just for KDE applications, without counting
the frameworks now (which need more love for their metadata, I will
send every data concerning a framework over Reviewboard, if I created
it), this simply does not scale
at all.

Therefore, I would like to ask for feedback on the following proposal:
 * We announce the availability of the new metadata somewhere, so that
the individual maintainers know that the data is coming, and that they
may want to take a look at it when it landed in their Git master
branch.
 * I simply go ahead and commit the files to the respective repos.
Since it's just data, it shouldn't break anything.
 * Others adjust the initially commited files as they wish. There is a
quick reference at [2], for those who want to add more data or change
something.
 * I'll help with any questions regarding that, of course ;-) - if
someone doesn't want this, the project can simply opt-out before, or
revert the commit (but I don't see any reason for doing that, unless
if someone doesn't want the application to be found ^^).

Would something like that be okay?
And: What is the license of texts about applications published on
KDE.org? Can I simply use a permissive license like CC0 (needed in
order to mix the texts in the distribution later) for them, or is
there an explicit license specified somewhere? (I wasn't able to find
information about that)

Cheers,
   Matthias

[1]: https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdeutils/ark/repository/revisions/master/entry/app/ark.appdata.xml
[2]: http://techbase.kde.org/MetaInfo

P.S: As a more general question: What makes a KDE project? Do we have
some guidelines for all projects which they have to follow in order to
be under the KDE umbrella, or are we more like a Github for Qt
projects nowadays?
In case there are guidelines, we might want to add "has AppStream
metadata" to them in future (when more projects have that data).

-- 
Debian Developer | Freedesktop-Developer
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