[AppStream] Extended info and dep-11

[Juanma Navarro]

On Tue, 20 Dec 2016 15:13:38 +0100
Matthias Klumpp <matthias at tenstral.net> wrote:

> 2016-12-20 15:07 GMT+01:00 juanma navarro <juanma1980 at gmail.com>:
> > Hi all.
> > I'm new to the list so greetings to all.
> >
> > I'm one of the developers of an educational distro based on Ubuntu. We're
> > implementing a store using appstream but we've meet one big issue due to our
> > special needs:
> > Although all of our software is installed via repos we've a few programs
> > that use a standalone installer launched via a external program. It's
> > software that we couldn't package (software provided by our government and
> > other public institutions).
> > The first solution was to use the <x-$key>value</x-$key> tag on our
> > appdata.xml with the url of those external installers. This works really
> > nice but now we're trying to generate a dep11 file to avoid distributing the
> > xml file and let apt download all the info from our repo but those custom
> > tags aren't included in the dep11 when we convert via appstreamcli the xml
> > to yaml.
> > Perhaps it's a silly question but,,, dep11 supports this custom tags? If
> > answer is "No"... could apt work with the xml appdata or it only works with
> > the yaml one?
> 
> Welcome to the list! :)
> The answer to your question currently is "no", but it won't be in a
> few days when the next AppStream and AppStream Generator releases are
> out.
> Then you will be able to define arbitrary extra values in metainfo
> files, and can advise asgen to let them pass through into the DEP-11
> data. Unfortunately this will require you to update your AppStream and
> AppStream generator versions, if this is an issue I could probably
> help you with backporting the patch to an older AppStream version.
> 
> Cheers,
>     Matthias
> 
> -- 
> Debian Developer | Freedesktop-Developer
> I welcome VSRE emails. See http://vsre.info/

That's great news. In principle we'll try to package that new version and if all runs ok there'll be no need to backport anything. Thanks!

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