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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

AppStream/DEP-11 Debian progress

There hasn’t been a progress-report on DEP-11 for some time, but that doesn’t mean there was no work going on on it. DEP-11 is Debian’s implementation of AppStream, as well as an effort to enhance the metadata available about software in Debian. While initially, AppStream was only about applications, DEP-11 was designed with a larger […]

AppStream 0.7 specification and library released

Today I am very happy to announce the release of AppStream 0.7, the second-largest release (judging by commit number) after 0.6. AppStream 0.7 brings many new features for the specification, adds lots of good stuff to libappstream, introduces a new libappstream-qt library for Qt developers and, as always, fixes some bugs. Unfortunately we broke the […]

Want AppStream metadata for your KDE project? Act now!

And again, another KDE-AppStream post 😉 If you want to know more about AppStream metadata and why adding it to your project is a good idea, you might be interested in this blogpost (and several previous ones I wrote). Originally, my plan was to directly push metadata to most KDE projects. The problem is that […]

Translated AppStream metadata for KDE!

It took some time, but now it’s finally done: KDE has translations for AppStream upstream metadata! AppStream is a Freedesktop project to extend metadata about the software projects which is available in distributions, especially regarding applications. Distributions compile a metadata file from data collected from packages, .desktop files and possibly other information sources, and create […]

AppStream 0.6.1 released – a quick look at what you can do with the cli tool

Today I released AppStream and libappstream 0.6.1, which feature mostly bugfixes, so nothing incredibly exciting to see there (but this also means no API/ABI breaks). The release clarifies some paragraphs in the spec which people found confusing, and fixes a few issues (like one example in the docs not being valid AppStream metadata). As only […]