Since mid-2015 we were using the dep11-generator in Debian to build AppStream metadata about available software components in the distribution. Getting rid of dep11-generator Unfortunately, the old Python-based dep11-generator was hitting some hard limits pretty soon. For example, using multiprocessing with Python was a pain, since it resulted in some very hard-to-track bugs. Also, the […]
Category: General
Everything which is published on this blog
AppStream/DEP-11 fully supported in Debian now!
Back in 2011, when the AppStream meeting in Nürnberg had just happened, I published the DEP-11 (Debian Extension Project 11) draft together with Michael Vogt and Julian Andres Klode, as an approach to implement AppStream in Debian. Back then, the FTPMasters team rejected the suggestion to use the official XML specification, and so the DEP-11 […]
What’s up in Tanglu?
It is time again for another Tanglu blogpost (to be honest, this article is pretty much overdue 😉 ). I want to shine a spotlight on the work that’s done in Tanglu, be it ongoing or past work done for the new release. Why is the new release taking longer than usual? As you might […]
Deploying Limba packages: Ideas & current status
The Limba project does not only have the goal to allow developers to deploy their applications directly on multiple Linux distributions while reducing duplication of shared resources, it should also make it easy for developers to build software for Limba. Limba is worth nothing without good tooling to make it fun to use. That’s why […]
Update notifications in Debian Jessie
Piwik told me that people are still sharing my post about the state of GNOME-Software and update notifications in Debian Jessie. So I thought it might be useful to publish a small update on that matter: If you are using GNOME or KDE Plasma with Debian 8 (Jessie), everything is fine – you will receive […]
AppStream/DEP-11 for everyone! (beta!)
One of the things we discussed at this year’s Akademy conference is making AppStream work on Kubuntu. On Debian-based systems, we use a YAML-based implementation of AppStream, called “DEP-11”. DEP-11 exists for historical reasons (the DEP-11 YAML format was a superset of AppStream once) and because YAML, unlike XML, is one accepted file format by […]
Akademy 2015
I am very late with this, but I still wanted to write a few words about Akademy 2015. First of all: It was an awesome conference! Meeting all the great people involved with KDE and seeing who I am working with (as in: face to face, not via email) was awesome. We had some very […]
Limba Project: Another progress report
And once again, it’s time for another Limba blogpost 🙂 Limba is a solution to install 3rd-party software on Linux, without interfering with the distribution’s native package manager. It can be useful to try out different software versions, use newer software on a stable OS release or simply to obtain software which does not yet […]
AppStream 0.8 released!
Yesterday I released version 0.8 of AppStream, the cross-distribution standard for software metadata, that is currently used by GNOME-Software, Muon and Apper in to display rich metadata about applications and other software components. What’s new? The new release contains some tweaks on AppStreams documentation, and extends the specification with a few more tags and refinements. […]
How to build a cross-distro package with Limba
Disclaimer: Limba is still in a very early stage of development. Bugs happen, and I give to guarantees on API stability yet. Limba is a very simple cross-distro package installer, utilizing OverlayFS found in recent Linux kernels (>= 3.18). As example I created a small Limba package for one of the Qt5 demo applications, and […]