AppStream and gnome-software are coming to a Xenial near you: time to fix packages!

Dear developers, [ tl;dr: We're switching from Ubuntu Software Center to GNOME software, and many packages need fixing in order to show up there. ] As you might now, we will be moving to GNOME Software for our default software management application from the 16.04 release. GNOME software uses AppStream metadata generated from the Ubuntu package archive to determine the available applications to show to users. You can think of this as a modern replacement for the current app-install-data system that Software Center uses. In order to make software show up in the new software center and to fix quirks in the displayed applications, it may be required to make packaging adjustments. We need developers to help out with this. Currently, there are many packages with errors which cause the AppStream generator to not include them. We want to get as many packages as possible fixed before 16.04 releases, in order to provide a quality experience. To see the current packages with errors, visit http://appstream.ubuntu.com/ which is updated hourly. You can see the data in action by using GNOME Software, which is available now in Xenial by installing the `gnome-software' package - and soon will be installed by default. The most common issues relate to icons. We are more strict about the icons that packages have to ship to be included, requiring at least a 64x64 icon and forbidding XPM icons. You can find more information about the do's and don'ts at the Debian wiki on https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines - including an FAQ item telilng you what the minimal amount of work you need to do is. :) If you want to enhance the provided metadata, you should try to convince upstream projects to ship your improvements. This is a cross distro effort, so other distributions will benefit if fixes are shared. Please submit fixes to Ubuntu packages on Launchpad following the regular sponsorship process of filing a bug and subscribing "ubuntu-sponsors". Please also add the tag "appstream", so that we can make sure to review all proposed metadata fixes. Include a link so we can see that you have shared your fix with upstream and don't have to ask. The Ubuntu desktop team is leading this work, and we can be found in #ubuntu-desktop on Freenode if you have questions. Lots of love from Brussels, Matthias Klumpp Iain Lane Lars Uebernickel -- Iain Lane [ iain at orangesquash.org.uk ] Debian Developer [ laney at debian.org ] Ubuntu Developer [ laney at ubuntu.com ] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 819 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/attachments/20160217/d8a62700/attachment.pgp>