Hi all,
I would like Inkscape to start shipping an AppData file for the GNOME and KDE software centers. At the moment it's invisible to AppStream-enabled software managers as there is no metadata file to read. I've uploaded a file here http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/temp/inkscape.appdata.xml which needs to be committed and then installed into the $prefix/share/appdata directory at install time; there's no need to conditionalize this as it's just ignored by any distro without an app installer. If you want to mark it translatable that would be great too, although I'm not familiar with what tools inkscape uses (intltool?) and I'm 100% okay if you want to change the description or add/change any extra screenshots. I'd like to make Inkscape a featured application in GNOME Software for 3.20 and an upstream AppData file is a prerequisite to that.
I first wrote a mail to this mailing list in 2013 when we started the AppStream project, but since that time over 1200 other applications have started shipping metadata files for the software center. This very much makes Inkscape the odd-one-out now, and now we're building nightly snapshots of inkscape as part of the xdg-app nightly repo we can't even include an additional file in the srpm like so many distros are doing. I think the time has come to move it upstream :)
There's more details about AppData here http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/appdata/ but I'm happy to answer questions or comments here too. Thanks!
Richard