Hi! Just adding my 2ct as AppStream maintainer:
- Centralizing AppStream metadata is IMHO a really bad idea, since it makes the life of people wanting to change or update it much harder, leading to fewer changes and maybe even less metadata. - Using d_eds old script is also a bad idea, since both the spec and the script have changed over time - years ago, I used it as basis for an initial AppStream metadata push to the KDE repositories, meanwhile projects have written and updated their metadata, it has been translated, etc. - so using that script again would be a step back. You can find the old metadata *templates* at https://github.com/ximion/kde-appstream-metadata-templates , for projects which don't have the data yet. I call them templates, because they do need to be reviewed and changed, so it's nothing to blindly push to a repo. That said, most repositories already have metadata. - AppStream metainfo files are very rich in metadata - using a markdown document makes it hard to add the same amount of data (e.g. that document would need to contain a way to define multiple screenshots with descriptions, having listsings with provided items, ...). It's not impossible, but saving some time and writing the data in XML directly is helpful. To make the metainfo fles in KDE more readable, one could think about adding the translation as part of the build process (like GNOME does) and not having them added automatically by scripty. - AppStream is already really well established - it's used by pretty much all major distros, and tools[1] exist to read and write and transform metadata. - AppStream is extensible - if you miss some functionality, please just talk to me and we can discuss adding it to the Freedesktop spec, if it's generally useful. If it's something KDE specific, you could add arbitrary tags to metainfo files if you prefix them with "x-" (the same way non-standard stuff is defined in .desktop files). Cheers, Matthias [1]: AppStream reading & writing (with limitations, no general data transformation, screenshot downloads, etc.) & Qt bindings: https://github.com/ximion/appstream AppStream distro metadata writing (includes searching icons and downloading & resizing screenshots): https://github.com/ximion/appstream-generator AppStream reading (cache-less) and writing (all modes), used by GNOME Software, supports things like firmware & CAB extraction: https://github.com/hughsie/appstream-glib
