Today, 12 years after the meeting where AppStream was first discussed and 11 years after I released a prototype implementation I am excited to announce AppStream 1.0! 🎉🎉🎊 Check it out on GitHub, or get the release tarball or read the documentation or release notes! 😁 Some nostalgic memories I was not in the original […]
Tag: appstream
How to indicate device compatibility for your app in MetaInfo data
At the moment I am hard at work putting together the final bits for the AppStream 1.0 release (hopefully to be released this month). The new release comes with many new new features, an improved developer API and removal of most deprecated things (so it carefully breaks compatibility with very old data and the previous […]
New things in AppStream 0.15
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]