In the next release of appstream-glib the appstream-util validate requirements got changed, which might make your life easier, or harder — depending if you already pass or fail the validation. The details are here but the rough jist is that we’ve relaxed a lot of the style rules (e.g. starts with a capital letter, ends with a full stop, less than a certain number of chars, etc), and made stricter some of the more important optional parts of the specification. For instance, requiring <content_rating> for any desktop or console application.
Even if you don’t care upstream, the new validation will soon be turned on for any apps built in Flathub, and downstream “packagers” will be pestering you for details as updates are now failing. Although only a few apps fail, some of the missing metadata tags are important enough to fail building. To test your app right now with the new validator:
$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists gnome-nightly https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo $ flatpak install gnome-nightly org.gnome.Sdk $ flatpak run --command=bash --filesystem=home:ro org.gnome.Sdk//master # appstream-util validate /home/hughsie/Code/gnome-software/data/appdata/org.gnome.Software.appdata.xml.in # exit
Of course, when the next tarball is released it’ll be available in your distribution as normal, but I wanted to get some early sanity checks in before I tag the release.
