[AppStream] Moving upstream metadata to /usr/share/metainfo

Matthias Klumpp matthias at tenstral.net
Wed Apr 20 14:53:55 UTC 2016


Hi there!
This is just a short announcement to highlight one spec change in AppStream:
Metadata shipped by upstream projects should now be installed into
`/usr/share/metainfo`.
Main reason for this is consistency and confusion associated with the
name "appdata" appearing in the previous path, which led some people
to believe that this metadata was only for applications (and not any
kind of software, including fonts and codecs).
Also, "metainfo" is the better name, because it is more precise in
meaning compared to "appdata", which is widely used for things like
e.g. gaming assets or any kind of runtime data an application needs.
Metainfo makes it clear that it is meta information (metadata) we are
dealing with here.

As of today, all AppStream handling tools support the new path, so it
is safe to use. That being said, there are currently no plans to phase
out the `/usr/share/appdata` path, it will stay supported for a long
time, possibly forever.
Also, there is no need to change the ".metainfo.xml" or ".appdata.xml"
suffixes, only the installation location has changed.

At time, the validator will not complain about using the old path,
since it's technically not a bug. This might change with later
releases, but there are no plans to make this an error-priority issue.
So, while switching to the new path is encouraged, there is nothing
forcing you to switch yet.

Cheers,
    Matthias

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