What's the point of parts.<appname>.parse-info?

snapcraft
1

Hello,

I have an appdata.xml file which contains a summary, description, version info, screenshots and so on. In my snapcraft.yaml file, I reference the appdata.xml file. But only the version string is extracted. Description, summary, etc are still not used. So what’s the benefit of using parse-info?

snapcraft.yaml

parts:
    sayonara:
        parse-info: [usr/share/metainfo/com.sayonara-player.Sayonara.appdata.xml]

full version available here: https://gitlab.com/luciocarreras/sayonara-player/-/blob/master/snap/snapcraft.yaml

appdata.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- Copyright 2015 Martin Gansser <martinkg@fedoraproject.org> -->
<!-- Check this file with appstream-util validate com.sayonara-player.Sayonara.appdata.xml -->
	<component type="desktop">
		<id>com.sayonara-player.Sayonara</id>
		<metadata_license>CC0</metadata_license>
		<project_license>GPL-3.0+</project_license>
		<launchable type="desktop-id">com.sayonara-player.Sayonara.desktop</launchable>
		<name>Sayonara</name>
		<developer_name>Michael Lugmair</developer_name>
		<update_contact>sayonara-player_at_posteo.org</update_contact>
		<summary>A fast and powerful audio player and library manager</summary>
		<releases>
			<release version="@SAYONARA_VERSION@" date="2022-01-01">
				<description>See release notes on https://sayonara-player.com/changelog</description>
				<issues>
					<issue url="https://gitlab.com/luciocarreras/sayonara-player">Search or file in issue reports at Gitlab</issue>
				</issues>
			</release>
		</releases>
		<content_rating type="oars-1.0" />
		<description>
			<p>Sayonara's goals are intuitive usability, speed and low resource consumption.</p>
			<p>It holds a lot of features like many supported music and playlist formats, optional but powerful media library organized as cover, directory or table view, tabbed playlists and a lot of plugins. For managing your audio files, Sayonara also holds a sophisticated metadata/tag editor.</p>
			<p>It's also possible to manage your web radio and podcasts.</p>
			<p>Info for snap users: There is currently a snap-related issue regarding the directory chooser. So the native directory dialog has been disabled for snap packages because of issues with KDE. If you want to use a native dialog, you can set it in the settings menu Force native dialogs.</p>
		</description>
		<screenshots>
			<screenshot type="default">
				<image>https://sayonara-player.com/media/images/appdata/sayonara-appdata-01.png</image>
			</screenshot>
			<screenshot>
				<image>https://sayonara-player.com/media/images/appdata/sayonara-appdata-02.png</image>
			</screenshot>
			<screenshot>
				<image>https://sayonara-player.com/media/images/appdata/sayonara-appdata-03.png</image>
			</screenshot>
			<screenshot>
				<image>https://sayonara-player.com/media/images/appdata/sayonara-appdata-04.png</image>
			</screenshot>
		</screenshots>
		<url type="homepage">https://sayonara-player.com</url>
		<url type="bugtracker">https://gitlab.com/luciocarreras/sayonara-player</url>
		<url type="translate">https://www.transifex.com/sayonara/sayonara-player</url>
		<url type="donation">https://sayonara-player.com/donations.php</url>
		<kudos>
			<kudo>HiDpiIcon</kudo>
			<kudo>ModernToolkit</kudo>
			<kudo>Notifications</kudo>
		</kudos>
		<keywords>
			<keyword>sayonara</keyword>
			<keyword>audio</keyword>
			<keyword>music</keyword>
			<keyword>player</keyword>
			<keyword>tag</keyword>
			<keyword>library</keyword>
		</keywords>
	</component>

Thank you in advance.

Michael

2

Hi Michael,

I tried to reproduce it, I built your master branch of Sayonara and got a nice resulting snap with the description from your appdata xml.

I also ran your xml straight through parse-info (appstream.py from snapcraft) and it extracts all the info correctly. So I don’t know where you see this “not used” behaviour? Could you tell me in more detail what you see?

Kind regards,

Brecht

3

Hello Brecht,

thanks for the reply. I am checking it in the Ubuntu Jammy Snap store. But I can only see the information I specified on the snapcraft.io webpage. May I ask you where you can see the description?

4

Hi, @SayonaraMichael,

You can set your public Snap Store listing to automatically update the description when you upload a new revision by navigating to https://snapcraft.io/<your-snap-name>/settings and toggle the option on that page labelled “Update metadata on release”:

image
image1920×1339 329 KB

1 Like
5

Hi @lucyllewy,

thanks for the hint. I will see as soon as I promote to the stable version.

Still a little bit nervous about publishing. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like