On 27 June 2014 17:59, Michael Catanzaro mcatanzaro@gnome.org wrote:
Appdata Complaint #1: I've found it very difficult to take good screenshots for my applications (the GNOME games). Most are intended to run in small windows, and do not look good when resized to 16:9. Some are unresizable. And Richard's screenshot window sizer extension is broken for apps with header bars, so my screenshots aren't even at appropriate sizes. I want to do better, but I'm not sure how.
I think without making the details page in gnome-software resize and reflow (which we don't really want to do) we really have to ask for 16:9 screenshots. I'm sure we can work on the padding+resizing algorithm, as that does some pretty brain-dead things (like resizing a 760x431 image to 752x423) sometimes.
Appdata Complaint #2: There's no standard on when to use the <project_name> tag.
This is what we've been working on http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/sect-Metadata-Application... -- it's for version 0.7 of the spec, but applies equally well on older versions.
I use it for games with generic names, so that the software center displays "GNOME Chess" rather than simply "Chess," but other apps with generic names do not use it.
You mean <name> then, not <project_name>. What I would do in this case is have "Chess" as the name in the .desktop file, and "GNOME Chess" in the AppData file.
Appdata Compliant #3: The <project_group> tag is also not used consistently. I'm not sure how many GNOME apps actually declare themselves to be in the GNOME project group.
Right, the metadata extractor uses a few different heuristics[1] to try and set the <project_group> if not already set as this is very important so that we prioritize GNOME apps on GNOME, and KDE apps in KDE. We've actually added a <project_name> tag if you want to show something translatable in the software center, e.g. "The GNOME Chess Developers" rather than falling back to the untranslated <project_group>.
Richard
[1] https://github.com/hughsie/appstream-glib/blob/master/libappstream-builder/p...