That’s interesting. I have read another article by hughsie, 3rd Party Fedora Repositories and AppStream.
I have successfully built the software for CentOS Stream, Fedora Workstation 31-33, and EPEL 8 with COPR. The steps taken to include metadata in a COPR repository are supposed to be automatic; unfortunately, metadata.xml appears to be unprocessed for distribution with the repository.
The Free Desktop specifications state that appdata.xml should not be used anymore, and instead metadata.xml. I have both for my project, and I’m building on COPR again using only appdata.xml to see if that makes a difference to GNOME Software. I do see the COPR repository enabled in Gnome Software, but there are no results when searching for the application and it must be installed using DNF.
Reading the RPMFusion information, it appears that AppStream Builder needs to be ran against the packages manually, regardless, and resulting files placed into the /usr/share/app-info sub-directories for Gnome Software to read. I’m confused as to why that is, when the metadata is shipped with the packages directly, and why instead the metadata has to be installed from the repository, as would a package, before installing packages.
The COPR information in hughsie’s article makes me believe that when a repository is enabled on a system any metadata for packages available through that repository should be installed to the app-info directories, but that is not the case.