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 […]
Category: OpenSUSE
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]