PPAs: no appstream-generator / dep11 data

[Rik Shaw]

Launchpad PPAs aren't generating the dep11 folders containing the Components-*-yml* and icons-*.tar.gz files needed for the necessary appstream data that in turn allows the apps to show up in gnome-software / ubuntu-software.

For example see the main ubuntu repository:

http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/xenial/main/

And compare with a Launchpad PPA:

http://ppa.launchpad.net/wasta-linux/wasta-testing/ubuntu/dists/xenial/main/

As I understand, the dep11 folder contents from the main repository are what allow the items to appear in gnome-software.

Thanks for any help in getting PPA software to appear in gnome-software!

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Right, the DEP-11 metadata is generated by a separate chunk of code and synced into Launchpad. It's not at all clear how we might go about doing this for PPAs; it would be infeasibly expensive to run the full-scale metadata extractor on all of them, but perhaps there is some reasonable smaller-scale substitute.

Iain, do you have any suggestions here?

[Matthias Klumpp (ximion)]

For the new metadata generator (appstream-generator) I could make the processing operation a bit less expensive at the cost of building less metadata (e.g. not downloading & resizing screenshots), but extracting the data would still not be a cheap operation, so maybe enable it only for some PPAs on-request?

[Rik Shaw (rik-shaw)]

@ximion This seems like a reasonable approach to me. It would be my guess that a great majority of PPAs would not request its generation. If any package is in the standard ubuntu repositories its appdata would exist, and the app would then be found by gnome-software, but when installed would pull from the PPA if apt has determined that is the version to install. So it is only for PPAs that deliver software not part of the standard repositories that there is a need.

If there was a way on the Launchpad PPA home to be able to tick a box to request the PPA to have appstream-generator metadata created it would be of great benefit to those that are stuck. Thanks for the consideration.

[Matthias Klumpp (ximion)]

Well those PPAs which have software already in the official repos might want to the the metadata updated though.
But I agree, it's not that important for them.
I think a process similar to requesting a bigger size for PPAs makes sense here.

[Jhonny Oliveira (jhonny-oliveira)]

Is there any progress in this? I would also like to have dep11 metadata on my PPAs.

In the meanwhile, I also created this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/2012296 . Which can be probably closed, as it is a duplicate of this long standing request.