Add Linux AppStream metadata

[MateusRodCosta]

Created for Flathub submission in https://github.com/flathub/flathub/pull/5877, see also https://github.com/hawkthorne/hawkthorne-journey/issues/2588

AppStream specification documentation: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/

[niamu]

Just confirming that this doesn't need to be placed anywhere special or linked in any way before we merge this.

If it definitely is okay here - which is probably the best place for it - can you just attach a comment to the top of the file indicating that this only needed for the FlatPak release?

Also can you make the change in the Makefile under build/hawkthorne-linux.AppImage to only copy AppRun, hawkthorne.png, and love.desktop as we don't need to include this metadata file for the AppImage.

Finally, feel free to add your username to the CONTRIBUTORS file and run make contributors to update the credits. There's a minor bug in credits.py that I'd be grateful if you could patch as part of this PR before running that command as well:

diff --git a/scripts/credits.py b/scripts/credits.py
index e7adc90c..917a21b5 100644
--- a/scripts/credits.py
+++ b/scripts/credits.py
@@ -8,7 +8,9 @@ with open('CONTRIBUTORS', 'r') as f:

 with open('CONTRIBUTORS', 'w') as f:
     for name in sorted(names):
-        f.write(name + "\n")
+        name = name.strip()
+        if name != "":
+            f.write(name + "\n")

 template = jinja2.Template(open('templates/credits.lua').read())
 print(template.render(contributors=[l.strip().replace("'", "\\'") for l in open('CONTRIBUTORS')]))

Thanks!

[MateusRodCosta]

Just confirming that this doesn't need to be placed anywhere special or linked in any way before we merge this.

Not really, just having it in the main repo in a place so we can say upstream manages it and it is the source-of-truth for that info should be enough. Also of course in a way that I could just grab if I made a full clone of the repo or could still download even if I grabbed the released .love.

If it definitely is okay here - which is probably the best place for it - can you just attach a comment to the top of the file indicating that this only needed for the FlatPak release?

More precisely AppStream is the Linux standard so you can ship some metadata that can be shown on app stores. It is mainly useful for apps on distro repos and flatpaks, AppImages don't really benefit from it as they don't rely on app stores (at least as far as I know). But, yeah, I can add a comment.

Also can you make the change in the Makefile under build/hawkthorne-linux.AppImage to only copy AppRun, hawkthorne.png, and love.desktop as we don't need to include this metadata file for the AppImage.

Sure, will do.

Finally, feel free to add your username to the CONTRIBUTORS file and run make contributors to update the credits. There's a minor bug in credits.py that I'd be grateful if you could patch as part of this PR before running that command as well:

Sure.

[niamu]

Thanks for contributing!

[hfiguiere]

Just confirming that this doesn't need to be placed anywhere special

it gets installed in $PREFIX/share/metainfo. It's the standard location.

[niamu]

@hfiguiere Sorry, I need more clarity. Is that something that we need to change here? My question was more about how flathub needs to fetch this file from this repository and the initial response I got back was that it didn't matter as long as we were the maintainers of the metadata file.

[hfiguiere]

the best practice is to ship it in the tarball and that make install or equivalent install it in the location mentionned. This is not specific to flatpak either.

[niamu]

Ok, just so you know, we don't have a make install and only currently offer an AppImage so I'm not sure how this is applicable.

[hfiguiere]

as I said it's not specific to flatpak. And you should have a make install rule too. (your appimage can reuse it).

See AppImage documentation https://docs.appimage.org/packaging-guide/optional/appstream.html

[MateusRodCosta]

Tbf, I didn't know AppImages had AppStream integration, I thought that due to their "portable" behavior they didn't need them since I assumed it is mostly useful for app stores integration. I myself only have flatpak, RPM and (likely outdated) PKGBUILD packaging experience and I normally don't use AppImages, so I couldn't really have known. 😅

Well, there's already a hawkthorne.love.zip download which is just the .love insize a .zip, if we had a hawkthorne-linux.tar.gz containing the .love game, the .desktop file, the .png for the icon and the .metainfo.xml metadata I believe it should be enough for me to handle on the flatpak manifest side.

the best practice is to ship it in the tarball and that make install or equivalent install it in the location mentionned. This is not specific to flatpak either.

Just a note, most games nowadays likely either assume they are self-contained or handled by some type of launcher, and not something restricted to a hierarchy similar to Linux's. I believe it's more beneficial in this case to just ask them to ship the game and other files needed for integration (desktop file, icon, metadata) in a .tar.gz and properly setup things to where it is expected when building the flatpak.

Of course, since they already have the AppImage I can look into adding the AppStream data to it as well.