[AppStream] Tagging applications as only useful in a certain locale

[Matthias Klumpp]

Hi!

Am Mo., 19. Aug. 2019 um 18:45 Uhr schrieb Philip Withnall
<philip at tecnocode.co.uk>:
>
> Hi,
>
> (Please keep me CCed, as I am not subscribed to the list.)

That's actually a problem since the mailinglist is subscribe-only
(Freedesktop doesn't have a lot of spam filtering for the lists). Next
time your reply gets bounced, I'll try to set your email address on a
whitelist, so you can reply to the list weithout being subscribed.

> At Endless, we’ve got various applications which are only useful in
> certain locales. For example, an application which contains an es_GT
> copy of Wikipedia. Currently, we use a special naming scheme and some
> downstream patches to gnome-software to hide applications which aren’t
> relevant to the user’s current locale. We’re looking for an upstream
> solution to this though.
>
> I was wondering about the <languages> element in AppStream, but it
> seems to be intended to report translation stats for display in the UI,
> rather than to encode which locales the application is useful in.

Indeed. But I think this will fit your use case anyway - it seems like
you would want to hide apps that are not translated into the user's
language anyway, so why not use this element and only permit it for
one locale, hiding it from all others?
A drawback may be that English locales will still see all apps, unless
additional logic is added to e.g. not display the software in case
there is exactly one language element that doesn't match the current
locale.

> Is there another AppStream element which could be used for this, or
> does a new one need to be standardised? Note that the solution needs to
> operate in terms of locales (language + country/region) rather than
> just in terms of languages, since content might be specific to a region
> and not relevant to other regions which use the same language.
> For those who follow gnome-software development, this is filed as a
> gnome-software issue too:
> https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/issues/697

I am not sure whether I understand the need for that restriction. Why
would an es_GT copy of Wikipedia be irrelevant for users on e.g. an
English locale? They may be learning Spanish and find that Wikipedia
copy useful.
I can see that users may want to filter by apps that actually support
their language (what the "language" tag is for), but completely hiding
apps that people think users of other languages shouldn't see feels
like the wrong approach.
(Expanding the "languages" tag to not assume that the default,
unlocalized version is English may be a good addition though, for
software that was written in a non-English language)

Cheers,
    Matthias

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