Add-on Metadata Initiative – Update

Before Christmas I started an initiative with an objective to write AppStream metadata for app add-ons and get them to Fedora packages and ideally upstream. So what are the results after two weeks?

In terms of attracting the community to join me in the effort, it’s been a failure. Maybe everyone just took time off during holidays which is also a good thing, we need to switch off from time to time. Maybe it’s just not an attractive objective for people. Anyway only one other person edited the wikipage and it was just added info about already existing metadata.

Nevertheless, I’ve done some work myself, so there are some results. I’ve filed 10 bugs downstream and 6 upstream (with created metadata attached). Metadata for one plugin (purple-telegram) is already accepted both upstream and downstream (well, it’s my package 🙂 ) and pidgin-sipe accepted it upstream. Actual results come slowly, but that’s what I expected. It’s also about awareness, explaining upstream and downstream maintainers why this is important, and how it technically works. Most maintainers are open to this, but we’ve also hit a rock. It’s a long-term effort. You need to patiently keep explaining that being included in the app catalog (that’s what this is all about) dramatically improves discoverability of the app/add-on for average users and I think more users is in interest of all maintainers.

The initiative is still going on and will be for a long time. So you can still join me, there are many plugins missing on the wiki page and many fields are still red 😉

One note: as a fan of copyleft licenses I’ve been using GFDL 1.3, but I recently found out that Debian has a problem with the license, so if you want to upstream the metadata it’s probably better to use a different license, e.g. CC-BY-SA-3.0.