[AppStream] Using AppStream for "Server Applications", Cockpit

[Marius Vollmer]

Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> writes:

> On 29 March 2017 at 16:24, Marius Vollmer <marius.vollmer at redhat.com> wrote:
>> and one of the ideas is to use AppStream.
>
> I think that's a good idea.

Great!  Yours and Matthias' reply are very encouraging.

>>  - This would probably mean adding type="server-application" to the
>>    spec.  Any issues with that?
>
> I don't think so, but I'm not sure about the name. What would the
> formal definition of "a server application" be?

Yes.  Just type="server-application" is too naive and wont work.  I
agree that we need to be very careful with extending the spec and I am
in no rush with this.  Let's get this right.

(Right now, I am thinking that we might need to add new server oriented
categories and type="cockpit-application" for a component that installs
a Cockpit plugin manifest in /usr/share/cockpit/<id>/manifest.json)

>>  - People might balk add installing all of the appstream-data package on
>>    a server and then ignoring all of it except the five server apps we
>>    actually have.  Can this be split easily?  Fedora could probably have
>>    a different appstream-data-server package for the Server variant...
>
> Sure, that's just a packaging issue. The XML files are all loaded and
> merged at runtime anyway.

Yes, let's ignore this for now and assume we can tweak this to make
everyone happy.

>>  - We would have to consume the metainfo stuff in Cockpit, which likes
>>    small servings of JSON.  How would we get a list of
>>    type="server-application" components from the available appstream
>>    cache?
>
> That's something that I could easily add to appstream-glib if
> required. What did you have in mind?

Nothing concrete yet, sorry.  Maybe a utility that outputs what we need
on stdout, in JSON.  I will look at appstream-glib.