On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 6:34 PM, Karel Volný <kvolny@redhat.com> wrote:

Hi,

not that I'd oppose the idea as a whole, but I'm a bit concerned about this part:

The AppData metadata includes simple XML files with app descriptions, and

a

tarball of app icons.
They can be distributed in the rpmfusion-free-release and
rpmfusion-nonfree-release packages and will only add a couple more
megabytes.

from the user's point of view, even if it is only "a couple megabytes", I'm not that happy if my precious resources are eaten up by things I do not use (while not that important on a desktop with unlimited 100 Mbps internet connection, situation could be quite a different on some mobile device with pretty expensive mobile connection)

That's why I suggested the approach currently taken by fedora of using a separate package.

For Fedora, the metadata + icons is 7.3MB according to yum info appstream-data. This would be much less for rpmfusion as rpmfusion has much less graphical applications. I don't consider 7.3MB a lot, in these days when storage is relatively cheap.

from the developers point of view, I just wonder what will happen with the icons packaged with the applications - are they going to be moved (i.e. a lot of cross-dependencies created and some extra work as we'd need to update two packages), or are they going to be duplicated (how will we ensure that it wouldn't get out of sync), or what?

The app icons for the appdata are extracted to /usr/share/app-info/icons/fedora-21/ - they are not installed in /usr/share/icons or similar, so no conflict or anything like that. They are always there when the metadata is installed.

To ensure they "won't get out of sync" you need to do weekly/monthly rebuilds of the metadata and issue it as a regular package update.

K.

p.s. somehow I cannot understand how do the translations work ...

Each upstream project can implement their own way of getting translations to the XML files, using gettext and similar things.

You can look in some GNOME projects if you want to see examples. gnome-boxes for example uses INTLTOOL_XML_RULE for this.

-Elad Alfassa.