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 […]
Category: Development
Software development
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Introducing Limba – a software installer experiment
As some of you already know, since the larger restructuring in PackageKit for the 1.0 release, I am rethinking Listaller, the 3rd-party application installer for Linux systems, as well. During the past weeks, I was playing around with a lot of different ideas and code, to make installations of 3rd-party software easily possible on Linux, […]