Progress on gnome-software is progressing nicely. Most of the major functionality is semi-working, although there are an awful lot of rough (and unimplemented) edges. Now the UI is coming together somewhat, it’s probably time to talk about what data it is going to consume. I’ve talked a lot before about extracting application icon and translations from .desktop files, but now I wanted to talk about long, formatted descriptions. Something like:
So where do we get this long description from? There seems to be many possible places to put this data:
- On the distribution web service
- In the ${app}.desktop files of the upstream application
- In the DOAP file of the upstream tarball
- In the package file description
- Some new ${app}.xml file shipped by application with all this extra data
- Some simple ${app}.md file containing markdown
Each has positives and negatives:
- All distros have to do basically the same work, and have to retranslate these over and over. -ENORESOURCE.
- It’s not much fun to do multiline descriptions trying to work on one line in a .desktop file, and trying to do rich text like hyperlinks and bullet points is impossible.
- DOAP files are not translated, and we only get one file per project, not per app. You probably want a different description for LibreOffice Calc than LibreOffice Presenter.
- Same problem as 3, and it also pushes the work to the distros, like 1. And it’s not typically translated.
- YAFF. Yet Another Format. Okay, it lets us define rich text (SGML/DocBook/whatever) but it’s another file format to be added to intltool and I’m not sure how easy it would be to get random projects to ship this.
- Easy to write, although much harder to extend in the future with things like screenshots and the like. Also, very hard to translate.
Also, anything except option 1 requires the use to have a big cache of all the possible applications they want to search for. So far I’m leaning on some kind of composite approach:
- Add a X-SoftwareCenterLongDescURI key to the desktop file
- Have a web URL with an .xml file on any remote server.
- Download and load the .xml file when the application detail view is opened
- Optionally translate the .xml.in using intltool and update the description at release time
- Applications not shipping .desktop files with X-SoftwareCenterLongDescURI just get a shitty app-detail view in the software center.
Comments, suggestions, flames, all very welcome. If/when we come to a consensus, I’ll write up a proper proposal with some guidelines for application authors. Thanks.