[AppStream] Inconsistent identifiers across distros

[Matthias Klumpp]

2016-03-23 16:15 GMT+01:00 Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org>:
> Hi,
> I've recently realized that even though the appstream id's are
> supposed to be the same across distros, there's some that change.
>
> Here's an example:
> ArchLinux has Chromium at chromium.desktop and Ubuntu at
> chromium-browser.desktop.
>
> Anybody has any idea what's going on?

Originally, Debian has a package called "chromium" containing a game
called "chromium-bsu", which also had the "chromium.desktop" file.
That game package existed for ages, and when Google released Chromium,
the maintainers agreed to rename the chromium game package to
"chromium-bsu" and the .desktop file to "chromium-bsu.desktop". To not
have users of the game install the browser accidentally, one Debian
release is absolutely required as transition. During that phase, the
chromium (browser) package was named "chromium-browser" and the
.desktop file was renamed accordingly.
Meanwhile, Debian has sorted out this stuff, and the "chromium" Debian
package is providing the webbrowser and contains a "chromium.desktop"
file, as you would expect.

Ubuntu, however, apparently didn't change the .desktop filename back -
reason for that being that changing the name back to
"chromium.desktop" from "chromium-browser.desktop" would break user's
custom shortcuts, and Ubuntu doesn't want that. This creates massive
problems for Ubuntu, e.g. they can't properly rename GNOME
applications too (the current solution is to ship
org.gnome.gedit.desktop and gedit.desktop, with the former having
NoDisplay set to true).
So, tl;dr: This is an Ubuntu-specific bug, and probably worth creating
a bugreport against Ubuntu, so they can apply the same workaround to
Chromium as they do for the GNOME stuff. That would require them to
ship an AppStream metainfo file though, so Chromium still appears in
the resulting metadata.

It's a mess, but I think you will find this divergence only in Ubuntu,
I am not aware of any other distribution doing these stunts (but I
think some run a small script on startup after dist-upgrade to fix up
all the .desktop file links to their new names).

Cheers,
    Matthias

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