Last time I blogged about AppStream I announced that over 25% of applications in Fedora 21 were shipping the AppData files we needed. I’m pleased to say in the last two months we’ve gone up to 45% of applications in Fedora 22. This is thanks to a lot of work from Ryan and his friends, writing descriptions, taking screenshots and then including them in the fedora-appstream staging repo.

So fedora-appstream doesn’t sound very upstream or awesome. This week I’ve sent another 39 emails, and opened another 42 bugs (requiring 17 new bugilla/trac/random-forum accounts to be opened). Every single file in the fedora-appstream staging repo has been sent upstream in one form or another, and I’ve been adding an XML comment to each one for a rough audit log of what happened where.

Some have already been accepted upstream and we’re waiting for a new tarball release; when that happens we’ll delete the file from fedora-appstream. Some upstreams are really dead, and have no upstream maintainer, so they’ll probably languish in fedora-appstream until for some reason the package FTBFS and gets removed from the distribution. If the package gets removed, the AppData file will also be deleted from fedora-appstream.

Also, in the process I’ve found lots of applications which are shipping AppData files upstream, but for one reason or another are not being installed in the binary rpm file. If you had to tell me I was talking nonsense in an email this week, I apologize. For my sins I’ve updated over a dozen packages to the latest versions so the AppData file is included, and fixed a quite a few more.

Fedora 22 is on track to be the first release that mandates AppData files for applications. If upstream doesn’t ship one, we can either add it in the Fedora package, or in fedora-appstream.