hexchat 2.14.1-2 added AppStream metadata for hexchat-plugins. Yay!

As soon as Debian's appstream generator publishes its updated
information, users will be able to easily install and uninstall these
addons from the hexchat page in GNOME Software.

There is a problem though. If a user unchecks the box for say,
Checksum, then Fishlim and Sysinfo will be uninstalled also. (And last
I checked, GNOME Software does not have good UI to show this.)

To allow those checkboxes to work as expected, please split the
hexchat-plugins into 3 separate binary packages. This is similar to
what I had to do for evolution, gedit-plugins, eog-plugins, etc.

References
--------------
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/sect-Quickstart-Distros.html

Thanks,
Jeremy Bicha

Control: severity -1 wishlist

Which kinda makese sense IMHO.
| A binary package must not contain more than one AppStream metadata
| file. The one exception is that it is permissable for a binary package
| that is extended by addons to include those addons (Section 2.6,
| “Addons”) and their AppStream metadata files. Note that users will
| be unable to remove those addons separately.
| Except for the extended package, no other package may contain more
| than one Appstream addon metadata file.

So it seems like the specification explicitly allows for extension
packages like hexchat-plugins to carry more than one metainfo file in
it.

Unless those plugins actually depend on each other (and aren't just
packaged that way), it doesn't make sense. (And the UI is really bad.
Just try it in a few hours. You may need to make sure the background
gnome-software service is killed first so that the latest metadata is
used.)

I was the one that wrote that part of the specification so I apologize
if I was unclear.

It is ok for the hexchat package to also contains plugins with their
AppStream metadata (but there won't be checkboxes for any of those
plugins so I don't recommend this here).
It is not ok for a separate hexchat-plugins package to include
multiple plugins because it won't work properly in GNOME Software.

Thanks,
Jeremy Bicha

I don't have appstream installed, nor I plan on installing it.  Like I
don't have gnome-software installed either…

Oh, I see.
I understood that, but I did the leap from "main packages contains
plugins and the appstream files can be there" to the separate plugins
packages on my own reckoning it would have been fine.

JFTR, I dislike such plain approach "the tooling is suboptimal, so the
world needs to adapt to such suboptimal tooling", and (even worse!)
"the tooling is suboptimal, so the specification needs to adapt to it"
which is the worst that could happen in any engineering situation.


Anyway, would it be fine for you if I split those plugins in 3 binary
packages, and make hexchat-plugins depend on all of them?
And if so, I'd use names like 'hexchat-plugin-sysinfo', etc?

Yes, please. :)

Thanks,
Jeremy Bicha

Hi,

This change is included [1] in zoitechat, the newly uploaded [2] active
hexchat fork. Better late than never!

sney

[1]
https://salsa.debian.org/sney/zoitechat/-/commit/85f4bc33a7cc5959de505b787941bd4c2c8f5024
[2]
https://tracker.debian.org/news/1744495/accepted-zoitechat-2180dfsg-1-all-amd64-source-into-unstable/