Results of the App Installer Meeting

[Matthias Klumpp]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:11:06 +0100, Michael Vogt <mvo at debian.org> wrote:
> [...]
>> AppStream focuses on translations of the name, keywords and (short)
>> summary managed by upstream. We talked shortly about longer
descriptions
>> (possibly with markdown) but this would easily blow up the currently
>> rather small app-data.xml similar to how the long descriptions are
quiet
>> a big part of our Packages files currently - beside the problem: Who
will
>> write these descriptions: Upstream is not necessarily the best author…
> [..]
> 
> When we take this from the desktop file, there is already i18n
> infrastructure for this. It will get imported into the pot file and
> the translations are merged into the desktop file. We just need to
> grab it from it. The problem of blowing up the data is indeed there,
> especially if we add long descriptions. In the long run it may be
> needed that we split similar to the Translations-$lang data.
> 
> But I'm not sure if we want long descriptions in the
> app-data.xml. Given that we have (long) package descriptions already,
> it may make more sense to provide translations for those.
Agree. If we take (translated) package descriptions as long applications
description, will it be possible to include them in the Xapian search?
Cause maybe the term an user is searching for is only mentioned in the long
package description, so the search-results will become better if the long
descriptions are in the database. (PackageKit is really slow in querying
this kind of data...)
IMHO long descriptions written by package maintainers are better than
descriptions written by upstream. (Maintainers are a little more objective
than upstream and can easily write down the most important facts about an
application, while upstream descriptions *might* become very long and
advertising)

Kind regards,
   Matthias