Skype not shown as installation candidate

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

I activated Canonical Partners, but Skype did not show up when I used gnome-software to search for it.

I have a theory (unconfirmed):

I used a 64 bits Xenial, with only amd64 architecture enabled. While the .deb package skype is amd64, it's a meta package. The skype-bin package, with the important files including the .desktop file, is i386.

So possibly skype would have showed up in gnome-software if I had first enabled i386 with

dpkg --add-architecture i386

OTOH, even if that's the case, I don't think it ought to be necessary. When using Synaptic, skype was shown.

A possible fix (workaround?) would be to move the .desktop file from skype-bin to skype.

Anyway, I could successfully install Skype from command line, and then it showed up in gnome-software. However, bug #1563322 applies to Skype too.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Matthias Klumpp (ximion)]

Probably an issue with AppStream and multiarch not being compatible at time... I designed a spec extension for that and did some code changes, but this stuff didn't receive enough testing yet so it isn't enabled in the LTS.
There are also quite some corner cases which need to be addressed before this can be activated.
A workaround would be do ship a dedicated AppStream snippet for Skype manually.

[Matthias Klumpp (ximion)]

At this point, I think it's safe to say that implementing full multiarch support for AppStream simply isn't going to happen. It's simply better for app authors to provide native implementations for amd64 instead of relying on i386 compatibility.
If support was implemented fully, we would download lots of additional big metadata and run into all kinds of troubles of which app gets selected when there are conflicts.
Resolving all of these issues is possible, but the huge effort IMHO doesn't justify the gains.

There is a workaround for high-profile packages that are only available on one architecture: *If* i386 support is enabled by default, the appstream-generator can be instructed to inject metadata for a specific package directly into the final metadata collection. See https://github.com/ximion/appstream-generator/blob/master/docs/asgen-config.md#injecting-extra-metainfo--removing-components for details. This is intended to be used for web applications, but may work for this case as well.