[AppStream] Unifying the AppStream IDs

[Richard Hughes]

On 25 July 2016 at 15:13, Matthias Klumpp <matthias at tenstral.net> wrote:
> For example, there might even be applications installing multiple
> launchers in future, which we can not represent with AppStream right
> now, but which is a thing Snappy supports.

What's a launcher?

> So, I really really want to strip the meaning of "this is a .desktop
> file-id" from the AppStream component ID. This will also resolve
> issues like we had with the kde4 prefix in the past.

So the AppStream ID is 100% decoupled from the application ID?

> What I will add to libappstream is a function to the the
> .desktop-file-id from an AsComponent, which software centers can use
> to launch an application.

<id>org.hughski.ColorHug</id>
<id type="desktop">kde-ch-client.desktop</id>

> That way, stuff won't show up on the SC if it uses the new schema.
> People in RHEL will likely test their apps and spot the issue that
> way. If you want, I can also defer updating all documentation for a
> while, so we can transition at a later time.

Define "a while"... I can't really say when we're planning the next
rebase, but it's not going to be in the next 12 months...

> Which brings me to a question: Should we limit the AppStream-ID to
> being alphanumerical and dash/dot/underscore? That would rule out some
> Chinese TLDs and e.g. URLs with umlauts, but will ensure everyone can
> type the ID. Does DBus allow unicode for interface names?

g_dbus_is_unique_name() suggests its not trivial:
https://github.com/bratsche/glib/blob/master/gio/gdbusutils.c -- it's
probably best just to use that function.

Richard