[AppStream] Appstream ID and Flatpak

[Matthias Klumpp]

Am Fr., 26. Okt. 2018 um 08:34 Uhr schrieb Alexander Larsson <alexl at redhat.com>:
>
> On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 1:25 AM Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hi everyone,
> > I'm sorry for resurrecting this thread but this issue persists and
> > this only makes the problem bigger.
> >
> > A way to mitigate this issue would be to include at least the
> > appstream id of the component from before renaming in the
> > appstream.xml.gz file that gets distributed by the repositories. (see
> > Klumpp's suggestion WRT
> > https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-Metadata.html#tag-provides)
> >
> > Or otherwise, we can find a smarter different way that I can't see at
> > the moment. But breaking the id part of appstream dilutes a lot its
> > appeal and proves we just have a hard time at working together.
>
> In flatpak-builder 1.0, when renaming a desktop file we add a
> X-Flatpak-RenamedFrom key in the desktop file. Does this help you?

That wouldn't really help. Flatpak will need to stop encouraging
people to change their AppStream component-IDs just for Flatpak.
One of the core promises of AppStream is to give each application a
unique ID that is shared across installation systems, so we can e.g.
always identify org.mozilla.Firefox as belonging to the "Firefox" app
from Mozilla, no matter how it was installed on the system (package /
Flatpak / Snap / AppImage / ...).

What would really help is if Flatpak would just encourage people to
name their metainfo files correctly and give their components a proper
<id/>[1] tag value (hypens are disallowed in the AppStream spec as
well now) and make them set a proper <launchable/>[2] tag for their
.desktop file.
These changes *must* happen upstream, so the metainfo file is shared
for the app, renaming things just for Flatpak breaks the unique-ID
promise and makes it hard to impossible for software centers to group
the same app together properly.

Cheers,
    Matthias

[1]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-Metadata.html#tag-id-generic
[2]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-Metadata.html#tag-launchable

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