It would be great if the action could run both the appstream and the appstream-glib validators.

• appstream-util (appstream-glib): appstream-util validate-relax --nonet PATH
• appstreamcli (appstream): appstreamcli validate --no-net PATH

As mentioned in the linked issue, elementary and KDE use appstream, everybody else (GNOME / Packagekit, etc) uses appstream-glib.

However, with the way you're currently setting up this action, it will run against unprocessed appdata files (named appdata.xml.in files most often - the *appdata* glob covers those too), which might not be valid until they get processed by gettext during a meson install.

The only way to make sure the "final" version of an .appdata.xml file is getting validated would be after running meson install - and if you're doing that, it could be part of the main CI anyway (where meson install is run for almost all packages now).

Also, I'm not sure if the test environment has internet access. If it does, you could drop the --no-net / --nonet flags - then the validator also checks if screenshot URLs and such are valid links.

This makes me re-evaluate this action a bit then. I'm thinking maybe the better route is to create a generic "build" action that can handle the meson building for elementary's projects, and then this just gets incorporated into the build action? That'd keep all of the meson install steps uniform, and we would be able to update general build config in one place.

closing in favor of #39