This is my penultimate post about the gnome-software plugin structure. If you’ve followed everything so far, well done.
There’s a lot of flexibility in the gnome-software plugin structure; a plugin can add custom applications and handle things like search and icon loading in a totally custom way. Most of the time you don’t care about how search is implemented or how icons are going to be loaded, and you can re-use a lot of the existing code in the appstream plugin. To do this you just save an AppStream-format XML file in either /usr/share/app-info/xmls/, /var/cache/app-info/xmls/ or ~/.local/share/app-info/xmls/. GNOME Software will immediately notice any new files, or changes to existing files as it has set up the various inotify watches.
This allows plugins to care a lot less about how applications are going to be shown. For example, the steam plugin downloads and parses the descriptions from a remote service during gs_plugin_refresh(), and also finds the best icon types and downloads them too. Then it exports the data to an AppStream XML file, saving it to your home directory. This allows all the applications to be easily created (and then refined) using something as simple as gs_app_new("steam:foo.desktop"). All the search tokenisation and matching is done automatically, so it makes the plugin much simpler and faster.
The only extra step the steam plugin needs to do is implement the gs_plugin_adopt_app() function. This is called when an application does not have a management plugin set, and allows the plugin to claim the application for itself so it can handle installation, removal and updating. In the case of steam it could check the ID has a prefix of steam: or could check some other plugin-specific metadata using gs_app_get_metadata_item().
Another good example is the fwupd that wants to handle any firmware we’ve discovered in the AppStream XML. This might be shipped by the vendor in a package using Satellite, or downloaded from the LVFS. It wouldn’t be kind to set a management plugin explicitly in case XFCE or KDE want to handle this in a different way. This adoption function in this case is trivial:
void
gs_plugin_adopt_app (GsPlugin *plugin, GsApp *app)
{
if (gs_app_get_kind (app) == AS_APP_KIND_FIRMWARE)
gs_app_set_management_plugin (app, "fwupd");
}
The next (and last!) blog post I’m going to write is about the per-plugin cache that’s available to plugins to help speed up some operations. In related news, we now have a mailing list, so if you’re interested in this stuff I’d encourage you to join and ask questions there. I also released gnome-software 3.21.2 this morning, so if you want to try all this plugin stuff yourself your distro if probably going to be updating packages soon.
