After my last post, I wanted to talk more about the refine functionality in gnome-software. As previous examples have shown it’s very easy to add a new application to the search results, updates list or installed list. Some plugins don’t want to add more applications, but want to modify existing applications to add more information depending on what is required by the UI code. The reason we don’t just add everything at once is that for search-as-you-type to work effectively we need to return results in less than about 50ms and querying some data can take a long time. For example, it might take a few hundred ms to work out the download size for an application when a plugin has to also look at what dependencies are already installed. We only need this information once the user has clicked the search results and when the user is in the details panel, so we can save a ton of time not working out properties that are not useful.
Lets looks at another example.
gboolean
gs_plugin_refine_app (GsPlugin *plugin,
GsApp *app,
GsPluginRefineFlags flags,
GCancellable *cancellable,
GError **error)
{
/* not required */
if ((flags & GS_PLUGIN_REFINE_FLAGS_REQUIRE_LICENSE) == 0)
return TRUE;
/* already set */
if (gs_app_get_license (app) != NULL)
return TRUE;
/* FIXME, not just hardcoded! */
if (g_strcmp0 (gs_app_get_id (app, "chiron.desktop") == 0))
gs_app_set_license (app, "GPL-2.0 and LGPL-2.0+");
return TRUE;
}
This is a simple example, but shows what a plugin needs to do. It first checks if the action is required, in this case GS_PLUGIN_REFINE_FLAGS_REQUIRE_LICENSE. This request is more common than you might expect as even the search results shows a non-free label if the license is unspecified or non-free. It then checks if the license is already set, returning with success if so. If not, it checks the application ID and hardcodes a license; in the real world this would be querying a database or parsing an additional config file. As mentioned before, if the license value is freely available without any extra work then it’s best just to set this at the same time as when adding the app with gs_app_list_add(). Think of refine as adding things that cost time to calculate only when really required.
The UI in gnome-software is quite forgiving for missing data, hiding sections or labels as required. Some things are required however, and forgetting to assign an icon or short description will get the application vetoed so that it’s not displayed at all. Helpfully, running gnome-software --verbose on the command line will tell you why an application isn’t shown along with any extra data.
As a last point, a few people have worries that these blogs are perhaps asking for trouble; external plugins have a chequered history in a number of projects and I’m sure gnome-software would be in an even worse position given that the core maintainer team is still so small. Being honest, if we break your external plugin due to an API change in the core you probably should have pushed your changes upstream sooner. There’s a reason you have to build with -DI_KNOW_THE_GNOME_SOFTWARE_API_IS_SUBJECT_TO_CHANGE…
