1597344 - Include AppStream data in Thunderbird for distro maintainers to use

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: OS Integration, enhancement)

Description

[Ryan Lee Sipes]

In many Linux distribution's "App Stores", Thunderbird does not have an icon or screenshots. By including AppStream data with Thunderbird, maintainers will be able to use it instead of the burden being on them to create it.

References:
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/
https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream
https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines

Comment 2

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Attachment: bug1597344_appstream_xml_1.patch

I found a few different appdata.xml files and merged them together to
produce this. Credit goes to Flatpak, Debian, Fedora, and Opensuse.

Firefox appears to be poised to add their Appstream file to the branding
directory, so that's why I am putting it there.

The Id field is set to be "thunderbird.desktop". That's what most of the
current variants use. Alternatively we could use "net.thunderbird.Thunderbird"
to set this version apar as the official upstream version.

TODO Items:
- Add to the build process so it gets copied to the install directory
  for Linux builds. It should get picked up by the source tarballs during
  release as is.
- I just picked an icon that's already on the website. It may make more sense
  to refer to icons in the branding directory, but the spec says it should
  be a full path to a file so I don't see how that would for us.
- Some screenshots would be nice. I've looked at a couple of App Stores today
  and they generally have screenshots, but they are all pretty outdated.
  I can't just use one off our website as there are size restrictions.
- Translations: The blurbs are pulled out of the website localization files
  so as hopefully that will make the process easier.

This file (mostly) passes validation with appstreamcli.

Comment 3

[Ryan Lee Sipes]

Comment on attachment 9109864 [details] [diff] [review]
bug1597344_appstream_xml_1.patch

Review of attachment 9109864 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

This looks solid to me! Let's get it in!

Comment 4

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Attachment: bug1597344_appstream_xml_1.patch

I changed the URL for "Translate" to not point to the MDN site, but to
thunderbird.net's link to that page. It will make more sense when the
new site goes live.

Comment 5

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

What happens to this file once it exists? Does it just sit there and we tell distro maintainers of its existence?

Comment 6

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

That's kind of the idea. It should get picked up in the source tarballs automatically. I don't think it needs to be in the actual builds we produce.
I am tracking what Firefox is doing with this as well. But screenshots and translations are the next move. Distros will have to put it in their .debs, .rpms, snaps, flatpaks... I think between Ryan, Wayne, and myself we can get the word out.

Comment 7

[Carsten Schoenert]

Please ensure that while a Linux build is performed the file is getting installed into /usr/share/metainfo.
The rest is up to the distro packagers to get the file finally into the packages.

Comment 8

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Carsten - writing to /usr/share/metainfo during a build is not possible. We can only write within the object directory.

As we do not provide an installer for Linux, just a tarball of binaries, it's outside the scope of this bug to create such files.

Comment 9

[Carsten Schoenert]

Yeah, if there is no install target than of course just within the object directory. And even it's not installed somewhere I guess the packagers are flexible enough to grep that file from the source directory if needed.

Comment 10

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

Comment on attachment 9113325 [details] [diff] [review]
bug1597344_appstream_xml_1.patch

I think we should use net.thunderbird.Thunderbird, but apart from that it's fine. We should keep an eye on what Firefox does with this.

Comment 11

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Attachment: bug1597344_appstream_xml_1.patch

I am in agreement with the suggestion to rename in comment 10, so this
version of the patch does that. Additionally, I renamed the file itself to
match since that seems to be how such files are named on my dev system.

Comment 12

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/3a03709927af
Add appstream metadata file to Thunderbird. r=darktrojan