Starting to adopt AppStream

[Aleix Pol]

On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 7:19 PM, Matthias Klumpp <matthias at tenstral.net>
wrote:

> Hi!
>
> 2014-08-05 18:44 GMT+02:00 Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org>:
> > Hi,
> > I'm deciding to adopt AppStream on my project (KDE's Muon Discover) and
> then
> > found that my distribution (ArchLinux) has an unbelievably old version
> of it
> > (0.1.6).
> >
> > I decided to just build master and see if I get to use it, but then I've
> run
> > into problems, so I hope you can give me a hand, so I understand it and
> can
> > fix it.
> >
> > First thing, I don't know what to do, appstream-index itself seems to be
> > broken, I've tried the commands in the documentation [1] and they don't
> > respond well:
> Looks like you've got old documentation content - try this link:
> http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/api/html/re16.html
> I'll better delete the old page then, to prevent confusion (all pages
> link the correct manpage though, how did you get this link?)
>
>From a search engine I think, either Google or DuckDuckGo.


>
> > $ appstream-index --what-provides -t mimetype -v text/xml
> > Unknown option --what-provides
> > Run 'appstream-index --help' to see a full list of available command line
> > options.
> ...which the becomes
> $ appstream-index what-provides mimetype text/xml
> :-)
>
Ok


>
> > Then I understand that I need to generate the xapian database somehow,
> but I
> > don't see anywhere what command needs to be run.
> Fedora runs
> appstream-index --refresh --force
>
appstream-index refresh
^
That right? --refresh is not supported it says.

I think I'm getting an empty database now, though, given that my
distribution doesn't seem to be supported.



> on every package upgrade. There is also a PackageKit plugin taking
> care of an up-to-date cache.
> But in order to generate the cache, you will need AppStream data which
> your distribution has to provide/generate.
> For Debian-based distros, a generator is under construction, Fedora
> has one (reusable for other (so far RPM-based) distros!), and OpenSUSE
> has one.
> The format of the metadata which is provided by distributors is
> documented at
> http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-DistroData.html#sect-AppStream-ASXML
> , together
> with the locations where it should be placed.
> If you want some real-world data, you can take the Fedora data
> (contains a few non-standard fields at time, but is otherwise 100%
> valid): http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=18639
> Debian is working on a YAML-based implementation (called DEP-11),
> which will also be processed by the cache generator very soon.
> If you need help with generating the data for your distribution, let
> me know! (Especially if there is documentation missing)
>

> > I would appreciate some help as I feel a bit stuck.
> That happens ^^ - Admittedly, the whole "which metadata where and from
> where?" thing is a bit confusing at the beginning.
> Cheers,
>     Matthias
>
>
> --
> Debian Developer | Freedesktop-Developer
> I welcome VSRE emails. See http://vsre.info/
>


Are generators what we have in src/data-providers, correct?

There's something I don't understand though. It seems to me that if we have
a packagekit backend, then we're served, as in we can populate the database
only with the appdata.xml files we can do the inverse look-up of the
provide fields and populate the database. Is there anything I'm missing? I
would prefer not to write much archlinux-dependent code if it's not
strictly necessary.


Aleix
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/distributions/attachments/20140805/ed77270e/attachment.html>