Maintain release info easily in MetaInfo/Appdata files

This article isn’t about anything “new”, like the previous ones on AppStream – it rather exists to shine the spotlight on a feature I feel is underutilized. From conversations it appears that the reason simply is that people don’t know that it exists, and of course that’s a pretty bad reason not to make your […]

Translated AppStream metadata for KDE!

It took some time, but now it’s finally done: KDE has translations for AppStream upstream metadata! AppStream is a Freedesktop project to extend metadata about the software projects which is available in distributions, especially regarding applications. Distributions compile a metadata file from data collected from packages, .desktop files and possibly other information sources, and create […]

Appstream: The next step

With the release of GNOME-Software 3.12, it’s also time for another update about what is going on behind the scenes of Appstream, the project providing all the data needed to make software-centers work. So here is the long overdue update 🙂 If you have attended my FOSDEM talk or seen the slides, you know about […]

AppStream Clarifications

While reading stuff posted by others about AppStream, and because of the discussion happening about AppData on kde-core-devel right now, I feel the need to clarify a few things. Especially because some are implementing AppStream in a way which is not really ideal right now. This is to some extend my fault, because I should […]

Release-o-Rama

Many awesome new releases have been made this week so far! PackageKit 0.8.4 The new PackageKit features lots of bugfixes and small improvements. It also contains a few new features, like showing PolicyKit dialogs on the command-line, even if no GUI is running. If you want to try the new PackageKit and are a Debian […]

Listaller Project – To infinity and beyond!

Nearly everyone who’s reading this blog will know about Listaller, a project started by me to make cross-distro 3rd-party software installations possible & secure. This project has been started years ago, and lots of things have changed in the Linux desktop world and down the stack, so I think it is time to look back […]

GSoC AppStream Final Report

This year I did a Google Summer of Code Project for OpenSUSE as part of their cross-distribution collaboration track. (Again, many thanks for letting me work on this and for doing a cross-distro track!) So, what did I achieve this summer? (Leaving out all the problems and stuff which didn’t work as I expected :P) […]

How to enable Software Center support on your distribution

Hi! My SoC project is nearly finished now, which unfortunately doesn’t mean that we will have a completely usable Software Center on all distributions – but the most difficult steps are done, all specification issues solved and I talked to many people from other distributions about the AppStream project and we made lots of progress. […]

PackageKit now parallelized!

With the most recent release of PackageKit, PackageKit 0.8.3 (published last Monday!), all my changes regarding parallelization have been merged into our master branch, which means parallelization features are now available for backends to use! Yay! The best thing about the new parallelization is that it will have an incredibly high impact on PackageKit’s speed: […]