[AppStream] [fdo] Wikidata IDs in appdata.xml

[Loic Dachary]

Hi,

Thinking about it some more, I'm not sure better examples would help much. It would show that some appdata.xml files are not as well maintained as they should or that some wikidata items are in a similar position. We know this is bound to happen over time. I think the real benefit of having links to cross reference wikidata and appdata.xml files is to make it easier for one group of editor to help the other. Sometime it will be wikidata helping appdata.xml editors. Sometime it will be the other way around. If the wikidata ID is missing from appdata.xml or if the appdata.xml link is missing from the wikidata item, this co-maintenance is less likely to happen.

I realize it's a different kind of advocacy and and that it's debatable :-)

Cheers

On 12/09/2016 20:13, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> 2016-09-08 16:41 GMT+02:00 Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com>:
>> On 8 September 2016 at 15:36, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I think that's a bad example; the gimp file is very incomplete.
>>
>> After debugging a bit... it's because you linked to an obsolete
>> branch. https://github.com/GNOME/gimp/blob/master/desktop/gimp.appdata.xml.in
>> shows what we ship now.
> 
> Thank you for that, I already added a task to investigate why GIMP
> ships a bad file to my todo list ^^
> 
> 2016-09-08 10:13 GMT+02:00 Loic Dachary <loic at dachary.org>:
>> [...]
>>> why you want this metadata piece in the files
>>
>> The Wikidata ID is a link to the http://wikidata.org/ item that contains facts about the software. Comparing the content of appdata.xml and wikidata would help users, wikidata editors and appdata.xml maintainers.
>>
>> The user (human or program) of https://github.com/GNOME/gimp/blob/gimp-2-8/desktop/gimp.appdata.xml.in has no information about the license. Using the Wikidata ID the license is found to be GPL-3.0 at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8038.
> 
> This wouldn't give more information than we already have in AppStream itself:
> https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-Metadata.html#tag-project_license
> And it would also add a potentially time-expensive web query.
> 
> Do you have a better example for this?
> 
>> The wikidata GNOME Builder item can reference the appdata.xml.in as the primary source of information regarding the license as shown in https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q20739542&type=revision&diff=374511744&oldid=374511702.
>>
>> The appdata.xml maintainer can harvest the descriptions translated into various languages from wikidata. For instance https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q20739542 has a french description that could be used in https://github.com/chergert/gnome-builder/blob/master/data/org.gnome.Builder.appdata.xml.in.
> 
> They could do that already by just manually looking at the page, could
> they? Why does that require defining a new field for the ID?
> 
>>> It will also help a lot if you could point out a service or application that will consume this data
>>
>> Whatever application consumes appdata.xml could use Wikidata ID when a field is missing.
> 
> Can you give concrete examples on which fields are in Wikidata and not
> in AppStream? And for these fields, I wonder whether it wouldn't make
> sense to do as Richard suggested and add them to AppStream and
> generate the Wikidata piece from the metainfo file...
> 
> Cheers,
>     Matthias
> 

-- 
Loïc Dachary, Artisan Logiciel Libre