Including review data in AppStream

[Matthias Klumpp]

2016-03-02 16:31 GMT+01:00 Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com>:
> Hey,
>
> For GNOME 3.20 we're using the xdg-app-review site for anonymous
> ratings and reviews, but this isn't going to be suitable for
> enterprise distros like RHEL. For RHEL we'd want to ship canned review
> data, i.e. that had been checked and moderated ahead of time.
>
> One way of doing this is to just ship a custom JSON file but a more
> standards compliant way would be to ship the review data in the
> AppStream format instead. If anyone else thinks this is a good idea I
> can work on a proposal for new API.

First, why isn't this on the appstream at l.fd.o list? ;-)
Second: I think this is a bad idea, since the AppStream format is
mainly designed for describing applications and static resources -
adding rapidly changing data like from ratings or reviews to it would
be bad, especially because this would mean you will always have to
re-download the whole AppStream file to get new reviews, and we would
need to set a limit on reviews.
Also, it would blow up the size of the metadata even more, which I am
not very happy about.

I think defining a dedicated JSON-based (or XML or ProtoBuf or
$whatever) format for this and specifying that in the AppStream spec
is the much better approach. I assume the new ratings & reviws API
would identify apps by their AppStream component-id, so integrating
that with existing SCs will be easy.

Some feedback from at least KDE and Elementary would be welcome
though, not sure if they are reading that list, but they should be
subscribed to the AppStream list ;-)

Cheers,
    Matthias