Doesn't seem to use deb package descriptions?

[Sebastien Bacher]

Using current xenial, softwares like vlc, inkscape, dia, .... gives one line detailled descriptions. It seems like it's using the .desktop comment, is that by design? The .deb (debian/control) descriptions are quite more useful and translators put ton of work in ddtp translations, we should make sure that's not wasted.

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

That's completely by design - we only use the appstream data and that comes from the .desktop files.

[Matthias Klumpp (ximion)]

Well, actually, we cheat here and inject the English package description as long-description, in case there was no metainfo file.
For some reason, this fails due to Python being unable to read bz2 files properly. The new AppStream metadata generator will fix this, if we can't pin down the issue in the Python stuff meanwhile.

Of course, the best solution to this problem would be "More metainfo files!" ;-)

[Matthias Klumpp (ximion)]

FYI, this is fixed with the AppStream Generator project, which supersedes the old DEP-11 generator - I am not yet sure if Ubuntu can use the new generator for Xenial already, but I'll discuss this at the GNOME Software sprint. Maybe with enough prior testing, this will be possible (which has some major other benefits besides fixing this bug, like having an (almost) accurate and always up2date index of files for the icon search, and beeing more than twice as fast).