applications backend data

[Aleix Pol]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 11:45 AM, Harald Sitter <sitter at kde.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 12:05 AM, Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org> wrote:
>> El divendres, 9 de març de 2018, a les 14:08:44 CET, Harald Sitter va
>> escriure:
>>> quick fyi: I am working on a change for the backend data of applications
>>>
>>> https://websvn.kde.org/trunk/www/sites/www/applications/
>>>
>>> new tech is meant to automatically crawl appstream appdata out of CI
>>> builds. eventually, I'd like that to be an api service you can talk to
>>> for app metadata (for now it's still on-disk blobs though).
>>>
>>> the data is mostly similar to the json blobs we have right now, albeit
>>> different keys (also the blobs contain localization data)
>>>
>>> the overall format is outlined here (except we dump json instead of yaml):
>>> https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/sect-AppStream-YAML.html
>>>
>>> please also keep this in mind for the new website. so long as the
>>> frontend bits are sufficiently abstract from the backing data we
>>> should be fine though.
>>>
>>> I hope to get this done today so it's easier to know what I am talking
>>> about.
>>
>> Can we please next time get some heads up before you commit things on kde.org?
>
> Yup I've messed up there. Sorry.
>
>> It's the second time in a row you commit things to kde.org and break it and it
>> lowers my morale a lot.
>>
>> The idea of autogenerating files is good, it's how the original json files
>> where generated, sadly your commit has caused regressions.
>>
>> There's dozens of broken links now, like for example, second link (for me) at
>> https://www.google.es/search?q=rsibreak
>>
>> As maintainer of rsibreak i find it to be an unacceptable regression.
>>
>> Also two months ago we agreed on this very list to still show unmaintained
>> applications (with an unmaintained marker) for the same very reason of not
>> breaking links.
>>
>> So what we need is a applications/ subfolder that at least contains the same
>> data it contained before your change, if it contains less data for any
>> application, that is a regression and even if it does show better data for
>> other apps I do not feel it's an acceptable loss, even more without having had
>> any discussion about it with the people that kept that data up to date.
>
> I presently don't have the energy. I've reverted back to where things were.
>
> HS

How can we iterate this in a way that we don't get the worse of both
worlds? I'd say getting the information metadata from appstream is
where we should be, if it's a matter of introducing some redirects,
maybe it's easier to just do that, no?

Aleix