AppStream

AppStream makes machine-readable software metadata easily accessible. It is a foundational block for modern Linux software centers, offering a seamless way to retrieve information about available software, no matter the repository it is contained in. It can provide data about available applications as well as available firmware, drivers, fonts and other components. This project it part of freedesktop.org. For Upstream Application Authors Quickstart Guides : Simple tutorials on how to write MetaInfo files for your application. MetaInfo Creator : An easy-to-use web application for generating metadata. For Distributors AppStream Generator : Generate comprehensive metadata for your Linux distribution. Uses libappstream-compose internally. Data Validation Run appstreamcli validate --pedantic /path/to/metadata.xml on the XML metadata you want to check. Any error makes the data unreadable, warnings result in degraded data (and parts of it may be ignored), while infos are recommendations that are not fatal. Pedantic issues are nice-to-have or may not be applicable recommendations in all cases. Your contributions make AppStream better! Whether you're a developer, translator, or enthusiast, there's a place for you here. Issues are currently tracked via GitHub Issues. Feel free to file your bug, feature request or change request there. Please be patient in case it takes a while for your issue rto be reviewed, and be open to discussions in case of feature requests. We gladly consider your changes as pull requests! Thank you for contributing and taking the time to write a patch. Make sure your code compiles in maintainer mode, and you may want to format your changes to adhere to the AppStream coding style. To help with the latter we provide the autoformat.py helper script to format code via clang-format . If you are using the released tarballs, the HTML documentation will be prebuilt and DAPS, which is a heavy dependency, is not required to make it available locally. To compile AppStream, make sure that you have all required libraries (development files!) installed. Then continue (the build system will complain about missing dependencies). For commonly used setup flags, use -Dqt=true to enable building the Qt interface, -Dvapi=true to build the Vala bindings, -Dcompose=true to build the AppStream catalog compose library and tools, -Dapt-support=true to enable integration with APT and -Ddocs=true to rebuild the documentation using DAPS. During development and before submitting a pull-request, you may also want to use -Dmaintainer=true to enable stricter compiler flags and other changes to aid development. To install the compiled binaries and required data, execute ninja install . You can help translating AppStream via Weblate! Check out the AppStream Weblate Page, and thank you for helping to translate this project!