Technical Blog of Richard Hughes

Does anyone actually use the PackageKit service pack or catalog functionality? If there are no users I’m intending to rip out the unused and unloved features from GNOME 3.12. Please say now, or forever hold your peace. Thanks.

A few people contacted me after discovering that screenshots should be taken in a 16:9 aspect ratio. The question was basically, how do I do that?

After trying to do this myself for my applications, I too discovered it’s hard. The wmctrl command doesn’t seem to play very nicely with CSD, and certainly won’t work in wayland. So, Owen Taylor (GNOME hacker extraordinaire) to the rescue.

Owen wrote a GNOME Shell extension (which I’ve modified a little) which resizes the current window to a 16:9 size when you press Ctrl+Alt+S. If you press it again, the window will get larger, to the next recommended 16:9 size. Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S and the window will get smaller to the previous size. Get the code on github or on extensions.gnome.org. I probably need some more testing as well. Patches very welcome if you’re good at shell extensions :)

With this extension installed I was able to screenshot all my applications that I maintain in no time at all. I’ve been uploading the screenshots into ${projects}/data/appdata and referencing the git.gnome.org URL in the AppData file so anyone can easily update them when the code changes, but this is completely up to you.

There’s a new version of the AppData validation tool, and this one actually downloads and validates the screenshots you’ve included in the .appdata.xml files. See the AppData specifications for guidelines on how to make good screenshots.

Get it while it’s hot, appdata-tools-0.1.4.tar.xz or I’ve built Fedora RPMs too.

Please yell if you think you’ve written a valid file, and it fails to validate using the tool. We’ve added a lot more checks, and we’re getting more strict — so please revalidate your file if you’ve already done so. Thanks!

More AppData news! I’ve been contacted by someone connected to Debian Legal, who apparently want me to add copyright information to the AppData files for licence compliance. Whilst most of the files are CC0 (basically public domain) it doesn’t seem super important, but it is technically required. If you ship an AppData file, I’d appreciate it if you could add <!-- Copyright 2013 First Lastname --> on the second line in the file. I’ve updated the AppData specification examples accordingly.

Additionally, the appdata-validate tool will warning you about missing copyright information if you use the –strict command line argument in the next release.

In GNOME Software, we show a list of applications for each category that we think are frikin’ awesome. Some have AppData, and some don’t. For the ones that don’t yet have AppData it leaves the responsibility of writing the long description to the Linux community, where we can push the data back to upstream so that all the distributions can benefit. So far we’ve had a superb reaction from lots of upstream projects.

For Fedora 20 we want all the awesome apps to have AppData, so users can evaluate the application before installing it. It would add a really nice bit of polish to the whole experience. If you can spare 5 minutes and want to help, I’ve got another shared document here.

The list of awesome-but-unloved apps is: audacity, ardour2, gnome-banshee, rosegarden, sound-juicer, doom, openarena, xonotic, tremulous, btanks, frozen-bubble, quadrapassel, neverball, gnomine, wesnoth, supertuxkart, redeclipse, lyx, gparted, virt-manager, eclipse, gitg, monodevelop, blender, shotwell, octave, saoimage, workrave, celestia, polari, pidgin, chromium, pitivi, vlc and openshot. If you want to add any other apps there, please feel free, although I would much prefer the AppData file to go upstream if you’re a contributor or maintainer of a project. Remember, we can’t feature applications on the front page that don’t have AppData, so that’s an added incentive. I’d love to expose more people to blender for instance.

There’s no way I can do all this myself for Fedora 20, so I really need your help. Again. Thanks.

Daniel Mustieles García has proposed a GNOME Goal that every official application in GNOME should ship an AppData file. See the wiki page and check your module. Loads of modules have already added files, but remember, the AppData file has to be translated and validated before it’s ‘done‘ for the GNOME Goal.

Thanks!

Thanks to a lot of help from the IBus developers, we’re now able to install and remove input methods in GNOME Software.

There’s a new version of the AppData validation tool, now with all the reported bug fixed, and a lot of new tests added.

Get it while it’s hot, appdata-tools-0.1.2.tar.xz or I’ve built Fedora RPMs too.

Please yell if you think you’ve written a valid file, and it fails to validate using the tool. We’re now being a lot more strict on things like formatting and the length of paragraphs. Thanks!

 

Hi all.

tl;dr: If you want to run GNOME Software on MATE or XFCE you need to set an environment variable like GNOME_SOFTWARE_COMPATIBLE_PROJECTS=MATE,GNOME,XFCE

Long version: In the software application we have the problem where applications have the same name and summary, but are targeted against different desktops. We know when an app targets a specific desktop from the AppStream metadata (which currently uses a heuristic from the .desktop file) so we could filter these out client side. At the moment searching for notes gives you two similarly looking results results provided by two different applications: bijiben (GNOME) and xfce4-notes (XFCE). Also, because of the shared history, a lot of the MATE applications have the same name as the GNOME ones. This makes bad UI.

The default is GNOME_SOFTWARE_COMPATIBLE_PROJECTS=GNOME (well, it is gnome-software after-all…) but if you want to show MATE projects and hide the core GNOME ones, just use a setting of MATE. If you want XFCE, GNOME and MATE apps to show, just use MATE,GNOME,XFCE.

As usual, comments and suggestions welcome.

A upstream maintainers have contacted me about some kind of validation tool for AppData files. I’ve spent a couple of days creating and then packaging appdata-tools which includes the appdata-validate command. This returns non-zero if there are any syntax or style issues with the AppData file.

I’d appreciate it if a few people could try it out before I start running it in the compose tool. There are already a few failures with the new builds in Fedora 20 Alpha RC3. If you’d rather install a package, I’ve just built it for rawhide, F20 and F19.

Comments and suggestions welcome.