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 […]
Category: General
Everything which is published on this blog
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 […]
Introducing AppStream-Generator
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 […]
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 […]