On the road to AppStream 1.0, a lot of items from the long todo list have been done so far – only one major feature is remaining, external release descriptions, which is a tricky one to implement and specify. For AppStream 1.0 it needs to be present or be rejected though, as it would be […]
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 […]
Introducing the MetaInfo Creator
This year’s FOSDEM conference was a lot of fun – one of the things I always enjoy most about this particular conference (besides having some of the outstanding food you can get in Brussels and meeting with friends from the free software world) is the ability to meet a large range of new people who […]
A big AppStream status update
It has been a while since the last AppStream-related post (or any post for that matter) on this blog, but of course development didn’t stand still all this time. Quite the opposite – it was just me writing less about it, which actually is a problem as some of the new features are much less […]
Adding fonts to software centers
Last year, the AppStream specification gained proper support for adding metadata for fonts, after Richard Hughes did some work on it years ago. We weren’t happy with how fonts were handled at that time, so we searched for better solutions, which is why this took a bit longer to be done. Last year, I was […]
About Tanglu…
It’s time for a long-overdue blogpost about the status of Tanglu. Tanglu is a Debian derivative, started in early 2013 when the systemd debate at Debian was still hot. It was formed by a few people wanting to create a Debian derivative for workstations with a time-based release schedule using and showcasing new technologies (which […]
A few words about the future of the Limba project
I wanted to write this blogpost since April, and even announced it in two previous posts, but never got to actually write it until now. And with the recent events in Snappy and Flatpak land, I can not defer this post any longer (unless I want to answer the same questions over and over on […]
Adventures in D programming
I recently wrote a bigger project in the D programming language, the appstream-generator (asgen). Since I rarely leave the C/C++/Python realm, and came to like many aspects of D, I thought blogging about my experience could be useful for people considering to use D. Disclaimer: I am not an expert on programming language design, and […]
Why are AppStream metainfo files XML data?
This is a question raised quite quite often, the last time in a blogpost by Thomas, so I thought it is a good idea to give a slightly longer explanation (and also create an article to link to…). There are basically three reasons for using XML as the default format for metainfo files: 1. XML […]
A GNOME Software Hackfest report
Two weeks ago was the GNOME Software hackfest in London, and I’ve been there! And I just now found the time to blog about it, but better do it late than never 😉 . Arriving in London and finding the Red Hat offices After being stuck in trains for the weekend, but fortunately arriving at […]