Month: June 2014

A lot has been said on fedora-devel in the last few weeks about DNF and Yum. I thought it might be useful to contribute my own views, considering I’ve spent the last half-decade consuming the internal Yum API and the last couple of years helping to design the replacement with about half a dozen of the packaging team here at Red Hat. I’m also a person who unsuccessfully tried to replace Yum completely with Zif in fedora a few years ago, so I know quite a bit about packaging systems and metadata parsing.

From my point of view, the hawkey depsolving library that DNF is designed upon is well designed, optimised and itself built on a successful low-level SAT library that SUSE has been using for years on production level workloads. The downloading and metadata parsing component used by DNF, librepo, is also well designed and complements the hawkey API nicely.

Rather than use the DNF framework directly, PackageKit uses librepo and hawkey to share 80% of the mechanism between PK and DNF. From what I’ve seen of the DNF codebase it’s nice, with unit tests and lots of the older compatibility cruft removed and the only reason it’s not used in PK was that the daemon is written in C and didn’t want to marshal everything via python for latency reasons.

So, from my point of view, DNF is a new command line tool built on 3 new libraries. It’s history may be of a fork from yum, but it resembles more of a 2014 rebuilt American hot-rod with all new motor-sport parts apart from the 1965 modified and strengthened chassis. Renaming DNF to Yum2 would be entirely the wrong message; it’s a new project with a new team and new goals.

Public Service Announcement: Debian helpfully defines datadir to be /usr/share/games for some packages, which means that the AppData and MetaInfo files get installed into /usr/share/games/appdata which isn’t picked up by the metadata parsers.

It’s probably safer to install the AppData files into $datarootdir/appdata as this will work even if a distro has redefined datadir to be something slightly odd. I’ve changed the examples on the AppData page, but if you maintain a game on Debian with AppData then this might affect you when Debian starts extracting AppSpream metadata in the next few weeks. Anyone affected will be getting email in the next few days, although it only looks to affect very few people.

Ever since we rolled out the GNOME Software Center, people have wanted to extend it to do other things. One thing that was very important to the Eclipse developers was a way of adding addons to the main application, which seems a sensible request. We wanted to make this generic enough so that it could be used in gedit and similar modular GNOME and KDE applications. We’ve deliberately not targeted Chrome or Firefox, as these applications will do a much better job compared to the package-centric operation of GNOME Software.

So. Do you maintain a plugin or extension that should be shown as an addon to an existing desktop application in the software center? If the answer is “no” you can probably stop reading, but otherwise, please create a file something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- Copyright 2014 Your Name Here <your@email.com> -->
<component type="addon">
<id>gedit-code-assistance</id>
<extends>gedit.desktop</extends>
<name>Code Assistance</name>
<summary>Code assistance for C, C++ and Objective-C</summary>
<url type="homepage">http://projects.gnome.org/gedit</url>
<metadata_license>CC0-1.0</metadata_license>
<project_license>GPL-3.0+</project_license>
<updatecontact>richard_at_hughsie.com</updatecontact>
</component>

This wants to be installed into /usr/share/appdata/gedit-code-assistance.metainfo.xml — this isn’t just another file format, this is the main component schema used internally by AppStream. Some notes when creating the file:

• You can use anything as the <id> but it needs to be unique and sensible and also match the .metainfo.xml filename prefix
• You can use appstream-util validate gedit-code-assistance.metainfo.xml if you install appstream-glib from git.
• Don’t put the application name you’re extending in the <name> or <summary> tags — so you’d use “Code Assistance” rather than “GEdit Code Assistance“
• You can omit the <url> if it’s the same as the upstream project
• You don’t need to create the metainfo.xml if the plugin is typically shipped in the same package as the application you’re extending
• Please use <_name> and <_summary> if you’re using intltool to translate either your desktop file or the existing appdata file and remember to add the file to POTFILES.in if you use one

Please grab me on IRC if you have any questions or concerns, or leave a comment here. Kalev is currently working on the GNOME Software UI side, and I only finished the metadata extractor for Fedora today, so don’t expect the feature to be visible until GNOME 3.14 and Fedora 21.