Just in time before the KDE SC 4.14 string freeze applies, I merged my last AppData patches and as of now: all KDE Edu applications provide AppData meta information. This means, they will be better visible in software centers like Apper or GNOME-Software.
Well, this is only a very short announcement, if you want to read more about the benefits of and ideas behind AppData and AppStream, please have a look at Ximion’s blog.
Just a personal experience note after touching those > 20 files: The auto generated files are quite helpful and provide a good start. But effectively, every file had to be adjusted by hand. This does not come from the generation scripts but from the fact that we have a multitude of application descriptions, webpages, and screenshots that are not all in sync (yet). The most common things that had to be updated in the pre-generated files were:
- The homepage address was missing or pointing to an outdated page.
- The screenshot URLs were broken, missing, or we provided an awfully old version somewhere at our websites (will be fixed soon or is already fixed 😉
- The description texts were often quite out of date.
So the next step after having this up-to-date AppData files is to backport the updates to the websites. In particular, I am looking forward to re-use the AppData files to have an easier way to generate the static application data on our websites. But more to that in a later blog post…
By the way: There is currently happening a lot in KDE Edu and you can help all those people who create free and open educational software for you by supporting the upcoming sprint in Randa:
Donations can be done HERE.
cordlandwehr 