[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Nearly all GNUstep apps are missing from the GNOME Software catalog

[Yavor Doganov]

Josh Freeman wrote:
>    Debian's & Ubuntu's GNOME Software app (GUI frontend for installing
> apps) has no listings for GNUstep apps, except TextEdit.

Right.  JFTR, I never understood what makes this tool useful.

>    If that's the cause of the 'gui-app-without-icon' errors, it
> appears that AppStream is making an incorrect assumption about allowed
> filepaths for icons; Are freedesktop icons required to be in one of
> those directories?

Yes, I believe that is a bug.  The Desktop Entry Specification says
that the Icon key can be an absolute path, in which case it is used
instead of the search path defined in the Icon Theme specification.
So I think you are right that AppStream is making incorrect
assumptions here.

All .desktop files of GNUstep apps have (or at least they should have)
absolute path for the Icon key, this is also what pl2link generates.

I wonder how TextEdit is available when its icon is in
/usr/share/GNUstep which is not part of the icon search path.

> * Icon-not-found
> The icon 'Paje' was not found in the archive.

$ grep ^Icon /usr/share/applications/paje.desktop 
Icon=Paje

That's wrong, that's why the icon is not found.  A bug in the paje.app
package.

> * Icon-format-unsupported:
> Icon file '[*].tiff' uses an unsupported image file format.

It is indeed unsupported, although I fail to see why.  TTBOMK, all
compliant desktops are capable of displaying .tiff icons and the TIFF
library is definitely installed by default as part of the dependency
chain.

We have two ways to fix this -- either to propose a change in the
standard (if that is possible) or generate .png icons at build time
for all those apps that have a .tiff icon.  That's most of the apps.
The latter is trivial to do but will take some time to update all apps
and I think it's unnecessary duplication just for the sake of this
AppStream thing.

> * Metainfo-no-summary
>    http://appstream.ubuntu.com/bionic/universe/issues/ftp.app.html

Missing Comment key, a bug in the ftp.app package.

> * Description-from-package (not an error):

These files should be translatable as the .desktop files themselves
and there has to be a way for them to be managed upstream.