Application Pages / BoF at Akademy

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Hi Andreas,

Am Dienstag, 26. August 2014, 08:38:23 schrieb Andreas Cord-Landwehr:
> Hi, during the last Randa meeting, Albert, Aleix and me hat a nice chat
> about how to use the new AppData files of the different applications to
> have a new way to generate the JSON files needed for the application pages
> (as for example this one
> http://edu.kde.org/applications/language/kanagram/) at edu.kde.org. (The
> current way is to parse the main.cpp and the *.desktop files and merge them
> with some magic.)
> 
> As far as I know (please correct me, since I only know the edu-www pages in
> depth) both Edu and www.kde.org use the same scripts to generate these JSON
> files, even if Edu forked them years ago. And actually, they are not working
> anymore since the script-logic is expecting all applications to live in
> SVN.
> 
> Our plan is to update/change the generation scripts at edu.kde.org to
> utilize the appdata files as well as to make them working with our Git
> infrastructure. The far goal, however, might be to reuse them for
> www.kde.org pages, i.e., for our application hub.
> 
> These are our planned steps:
> * BoF: we registered a BoF at Akademy's Wednesday, 11:30am to which everyone
> interested is invited (primary goal: technical discussion how the scripts
> shall work, how everything fits into our infrastructure)
> * Protoype: I plan to make a prototype for converting those appdata files
> and see which of the information our JSON files provide we can gain this
> way * Edu-Testrun: update edu.kde.org
> * Later: see if/how the scripts can be reused for www.kde.org

I will see to join as well, as I have played around with metainfo of apps some 
years ago, and still have some open issues there:

I once wrote the code behind utils.kde.org which generates pages like e.g.
	http://utils.kde.org/projects/ark/development.php
from here
	https://projects.kde.org/projects/websites/utils-kde-org/repository/revisions/master/entry/projects/ark/development.php
based on some database files manually maintained in the website. See
https://projects.kde.org/projects/websites/utils-kde-org/repository

The scripts for www.kde.org were inspired by that from what I remember, and I 
still have an open promise to help in that area.

But I also saw other chances with metadata of apps: creating templates for 
package spec files. Or creating KAboutData code from it. The sources of a 
working prototype tool are still alive, read the README for some inspiration:
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/devtools/aboutdata/README?view=markup

Sadly wiki.kde.org where I collected lots of ideas around that has meanwhile 
seen /dev/null, but I might have a backup still somewhere.

Would be great to finally push that somewhere forward. So I will at least sit 
and listen there.

Cheers
Friedrich