1071061 - Please install the supplied AppData file on Linux

Status: REOPENED

(Firefox :: Shell Integration, enhancement, P5)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0
Build ID: 20140816133558

Steps to reproduce:

Please consider installing this AppData file we wrote: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hughsie/fedora-appstream/master/appdata-extra/desktop/firefox.appdata.xml

This is used in GNOME and KDE software installers to add the application description and some screenshots. We'd love to showcase more applications, but without the extra data file we can't. The AppData file needs to be installed to /usr/share/appdata/ on Linux and the basename needs to match the .desktop basename. It would also be great if you could integrate the file with your translation system (e.g. intltool) to make the descriptions translated.

See http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/appdata/ for more details; thanks!

Richard



Actual results:

Firefox looks beautiful in the software center.


Expected results:

Firefox should look awesome.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Mozilla.org doesn't provide an installer for linux, only a .tar.bz2 file is offered
example: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/32.0.2/linux-x86_64/en-US/
Packages are created by the distributions and you have to ask Fedora, Ubuntu, debian ... to include it in their packages

Comment 2

[Jan Horak [:jhorak]]

I think it is a time to reconsider this.

The AppData is now a distro-agnostic format under the umbrella of FreeDesktop.org which is currently used in all major distributions (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, RHEL, Arch,...) to create rich app profile in app catalogs (e.g. GNOME Software or KDE Muon):
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/

The format is widely used among Linux distributions and an app profile is part of the app branding, so it definitely makes sense to maintain this metadata upstream. This way, Mozilla has control over the
description and screenshots and can ensure the same messaging across Linux distributions.

The metadata has been shipped upstream for example by LibreOffice and now it's being accepted by Chromium as well.

The metadata can also be translated to provide the best experience to
users who don't speak English:
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/sect-Quickstart-Translation.html

To do that, we would need to put the right appdata.xml into browser/branding/official/ directory (or also browser/branding/aurora in case someone would like to ship Developer Edition). I would leave it up to package maintainer how to obtain it from tarball, or we could install it to the /usr/share/metainfo/%{id}.appdata.xml as mentioned in the specification there: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-Quickstart.html#sect-Quickstart-DesktopApps

I think the shell integration is the better component. This enhancement could be also discussed or even moved to the marketing team if relevant.

Comment 3

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Do you have a new version of this file? The old one is a 404.

Comment 4

[[e-mail]]

Sure, I spent a bit of time updating it to the latest specification level this morning. https://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/temp/firefox.appdata.xml

Thanks, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Richard.

Comment 5

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

404 again. Sorry, can you provide the file again and this time I will attach?

Comment 6

[[e-mail]]

I've re-uploaded it to https://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/temp/firefox.appdata.xml -- it's missing lots of important information. `appstream-util validate-relax` can be used to validate the document. It also needs wiring in to the translation system somehow. Thanks.