An oft-requested feature is to show suggestions for other apps to install. This is useful if the apps are part of a larger suite of application, or if the apps are in some way complimentary to each other. A good example might be that we want to recommend libreoffice-writer when the user is looking at the details (or perhaps had just installed) libreoffice-calc.
At the moment we’ve got got any UI using this kind of data, as simply put, there isn’t much data to use. Using the ODRS I can kinda correlate things that the same people look at (i.e. user A got review for B and C, so B+C are possibly related) but it’s not as good as actual upstream information.
Those familiar with my history will be unsuprised: AppData to the rescue! By adding lines like this in the foo.appdata.xml file you can provide some information to the software center:
<suggests>
<id>libreoffice-draw.desktop</id>
<id>libreoffice-calc.desktop</id>
</suggests>
You don’t have to specify the parent app (e.g. libreoffice-writer.desktop in this case) and is the only tag that’s accepted. If isn’t found in the AppStream metadata then it’s just ignored, so it’s quite safe to add things that might not be in stable distros.
If enough upstreams do this then we can look at what UI makes sense. If you make use of this feature, please let me know and I can make sure we discuss the use-case in the design discussions.
