GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 763789
Applications in AudioVideo category not shown
Last modified: 2016-04-11 15:00:30 UTC
One of the main categories in the menu-spec [1] is AudioVideo. GNOME Software doesn't show this category (it does show the Audio and Video categories). This is causing k3b (CD/DVD burner) not to show. Note that Brasero does show, because it has AudioVideo;Audio;Video as categories. The question is - should k3b gain the Audio;Video categories OR should GNOME Software automatically add it to both these categories? [1] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/menu-spec-1.0.html#category-registry
For what it's worth, the AudioVideo categories seems pointless when you can specify Audio;Video...
tl;dr, I think it makes sense for k3b to have AudioVideo;Audio;Video -- the idea of AudioVideo originally was so that you could have a combined menu in the old GNOME 2 / KDE3 days, but given gnom-software explicitly separates these out AudioVideo is kinda ignored. I suppose you could argue that adding AudioVideo means the builder should also add Audio;Video, but I'd rather not do this as it means putting the workaround in both the builder, and gnome-software, as we need to support showing apps installed but not in the appstream data.
Of course, the other option is to add a "Multimedia" category that shows everything in AudioVideo. The advantage is GNOME Software would then meet the spec. What was the reason it wasn't implemented?
@hughsie: "AudioVideo" is a main category in the Freedesktop Menu spec[1], and therefore it should be supported to not surprise software developers, since adding AudioVideo alone is sufficient so satisfy the XDG menu requirements. On KDE, we interpret "AudioVideo" as "Multimedia" and create one section for it, because with "Audio" and "Video" separated, it would be very confusing for users where e.g. a disk burner or a video authoring tool would be found (because the latter can also easily work with audio tracks, for example). Therefore, I would suggest one of the following: 1) Unify Audio/Video in GNOME Software as "Multimedia" 2) Interpret "AudioVideo" as "Audio" and "Video" and show it in both categories 3) Create new "Multimedia" category additionally to the existing categories 4) Create "Multimedia" category, make Audio and Video subcategories. IMHO 2) would be very easy to implement and would solve this issue nicely (and only GS would need a patch). [1]: https://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/apa.html
So, the reason we chose Audio *and* Video is that we needed a number of categories that was (n+1)%4=0 and (n+1)%3=0 so that we can show the category buttons as a square box and be able to rescale this as the window gets larger and smaller. +1 is for "Addons" which we use as an artificial category for system wide stuff like codecs and fonts. Given this, I suppose #2 is the best option.
Does https://github.com/hughsie/appstream-glib/commit/ad75a92566903ccff22c59342752b6a5632a7e07 fix this bug?
I only briefly tested it here, but it seems to work. Thanks!