ximion/metainfocreator

Create AppStream MetaInfo files and auxiliary fd.o metadata easily

AppStream MetaInfo Creator

AppStream is a cross-distro effort for providing metadata for software in the Freedesktop ecosystem. It provides a convenient way to get information about not installed software, and is one of the building blocks for software centers.

This web application provides an easy way to generate good initial metadata for some software types to represent them in software centers or to provide additional metadata for systems. Users just have to answer a few questions to get started with creating AppStream MetaInfo/AppData files.

Users

Users can use the production instance hosted at Freedesktop.org to generate their metadata. All metadata generation happens locally in the browser, no data is transferred to Freedesktop.

Developers

The MetaInfo Creator is an Angular (9+) web application intended to make it very easy for users to generate MetaInfo files to ship with their software.

Installing Angular

First, you need to install Node.js via your distribution's package manager. Then you need to fetch NPM, the Node package manager and install that one as well. Once that is finished, you can install the Angular CLI globally and set up the repository:

# install Angular
npm install -g @angular/cli
# retrieve other stuff we need
npm install .

Development server

Run ng serve for a development server. Navigate to http://localhost:4200/. The app will automatically reload if you change any of the source files.

Build

Run the provided ./build-dist.py script to build the project. The build artifacts will be stored in the dist/ directory. Use the --prod flag for a production build.

metainfocreator's Issues

Prepopulate reasonable default value

Hi @ximion thanks for making this useful web app.

Maybe you'd like to prepopulate reasonable default values, like I had done in http://output.jsbin.com/qoqukof - seeing reasonable default values always helps me to know what I am supposed to enter without thinking much.

Error if no www. subdomain

The FreeDesktop site is browsable with or without the www. subdomain, but this web app errors when it's missing.

Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/metainfocreator/runtime-es2015.45e9bfaa34de10543cc5.js. (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing). Status code: 200.

Module source URI is not allowed in this document: “https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/metainfocreator/runtime-es2015.45e9bfaa34de10543cc5.js”.

Capitalisation and hyphenation of final element of <id>

Most packages on flathub capitalise the final element of a .

The specification seems to suggest that hyphens are acceptable in the final element https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-Metadata.html#tag-id-generic

This creator takes "Celestia-qt6" and "https://celestiaproject.space" and produces: <id>space.celestiaproject.celestia_qt6</id>

Should I should change every instance of the id to space.celestiaproject.celestia_qt6 or is space.celestiaproject.Celestia-qt6 is acceptable in the metainfo file?

Wishlist: Metainfo validation service

Having this tool will hopefully greatly help people put together properly working metainfo files. What would be great to have, too, would be a validation service for metainfo files, e.g., some REST API you could POST a metainfo file to and get back its validity.

Missing secondary category spell checker

Missing secondary category spell checker

https://github.com/ximion/metainfocreator/blob/master/src/assets/categories-secondary.json#L240

Won’t allow hyphens in application ID

Hi there. Thank you for creating this great piece of software.
I was looking at using it for creating appstream metadata for my application called wormhole-gui. When I entered the unique identifier for it (com.github.jacalz.wormhole-gui), it complained about hyphens not being allowed.

I know that websites allow hyphens (https://wi-fi.org) and I couldn’t find any information about hyphens not being allowed for unique software identifiers (or appID). Is this something that is specific to the appstream specification or am I just missing something obvious here? I would greatly appreciate if someone could clear up the situation for me :)

Add support for adding releases

It would be great to support adding releases. This is a requirement to publish a Flatpak application. Some useful fields to support would be description and url.

Example:
https://github.com/Jacalz/rymdport/blob/9bfedcf17e17eee7eff505b18543987740e66eae/internal/assets/unix/io.github.jacalz.rymdport.appdata.xml#L39

Homepage is missing from the generated config

I included a homepage in the form:

but it's missing from the generated config:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<component type="desktop-application">
  <id>net.launchpad.email_reminder</id>
  
  <name>Email-reminder</name>
  <summary>Send event reminders by email</summary>
  
  <metadata_license>CC0-1.0</metadata_license>
  <project_license>GPL-3.0-or-later</project_license>
  
  <description>
    <p>
      Email-reminder allows users to define events that they want to be reminded of by email.  Possible events include birthdays, anniversaries and yearly events. Reminders can be sent on the day of the event and/or a few days beforehand.
    </p>
  </description>
  
  <launchable type="desktop-id">email-reminder.desktop</launchable>
  <screenshots>
    <screenshot type="default">
      <image>https://screenshots.debian.net/shrine/screenshot/336/simage/large-bd786dc14681f22164a138cf7c968902.png</image>
    </screenshot>
    <screenshot>
      <image>https://screenshots.debian.net/shrine/screenshot/150/simage/large-60f5de6cb52722984fecbb86f5a880d7.png</image>
    </screenshot>
    <screenshot>
      <image>https://screenshots.debian.net/shrine/screenshot/337/simage/large-d39de85025841fa04a20e40884921140.png</image>
    </screenshot>
  </screenshots>
</component>

Ambiguosly choosing LGPL license

When choosing a license, it is ambiguous what is exactly chosen. See the screenshot

And the licenses in https://github.com/ximion/metainfocreator/blob/master/src/assets/spdx-licenses.json#L1019

For the user it is not clear why there are duplicates or what is the impacht of chosing one of two licenses with the same name.

Add support for creating OARS rating

It would be great if an OARS rating could be generated similar to https://hughsie.github.io/oars/generate.html.

Add fields for donations, bug tracker and translations

The field for homepage is there, but it would be great if we could input links for donations and bug tracker.

Example:

  <url type="bugtracker">https://github.com/Jacalz/rymdport/issues</url>
  <url type="donation">https://github.com/sponsors/Jacalz</url>

Also translations:

https://github.com/Beep6581/RawTherapee/blob/59a36d8f8a79918749a9da298bf559a0cedc4cf8/com.rawtherapee.RawTherapee.appdata.xml#L22