Wishlist: Metainfo validation service

[probonopd]

Having this tool will hopefully greatly help people put together properly working metainfo files. What would be great to have, too, would be a validation service for metainfo files, e.g., some REST API you could POST a metainfo file to and get back its validity.

[ximion]

That was my initial idea, but that would have required some webserver to run a Flask Python app on. Because there is no way I am reimplementing libappstream's validator in JavaScript, it is already a pretty complex thing.
If this feature could be made optional somehow, I'd consider it (but then Freedesktop couldn't offer it, as that can only serve static data...). So, nice to have, but currently not a priority. The tool will simply advise people to validate their data locally.

[probonopd]

there is no way I am reimplementing libappstream's validator in JavaScript

Ah, that's what I was hoping for; this way the validation code could run on the client side and on the server side, too.

Would it be possible to compile the existing validator to WebAssembly?

[ximion]

I have no idea - a bunch of other libraries (like GLib) would also have to be compiled to wasm for that to work.
At least currently, I don't think it's worth the effort.
In other news, the "create GUI app" form of the MetaInfo creator produces data that I'm happy with now and that is complete enough :-)
Now this just needs some user testing and a few more explanatory texts in a few places.