To begin with, here’s something Google Summer of Code. The above project is a part of Google Summer of Code ‘14 which is a well known program for promoting free and open source softwares among students. The project is being supervised by Matthias Klumpp who is a Debian Developer(DD)

I’ll try to cover everything under a single post about AppStream and what this project aims to achieve in layman’s terms.

AppStream

AppStream is a cross-distro specification for software metadata, as well as libraries reading the data. The metadata of an archive is kept in the ftp servers, where the packages reside too. And these metadata is kept in a format that is readable by AppStream. AppStream allows Software Center-like applications like Ubuntu Software Center or Apper to talk to these servers and provide informations to the users. AppStream makes cross-distribution possible as it specifies a standard for the metadata and also provide libraries which can be used to by any Software center clients. More about AppStream can be found here

Debian Enhancement Proposal(DEP) 11

DEP-11 is a draft made to support AppStream for Debian. Debian currently doesn’t support AppStream. DEP-11 proposes the metadata to be kept in YAML format and not in xml which is the format specified by AppStream. So to realize this, we needed to write a generator that generates data in accordance with DEP-11 draft. This was the main aim of the project. More about the DEP-11 draft could be found here. More about the generator later, which is the product of the project. But will see what we achieve from the project.

What we gain ?

As a Debian user, we gain a lot from this project. The project makes it possible to have “Software Center” like applications for Debian which has been missing. The most important aspect in realizing the above goal(i.e having a application manager) is the availability of data which is to be used by such softwares. I hope this will help broaden the user-base of Debian, since hassle free package-installation can lead to increased adoption.

DEP-11 metadata generator

This is what I have worked on as my Google Summer of Code project. I have made the generator which reads two main sources of metadata .desktop files and appdata xml files, and converts them into YAML format. The generator will be a part of Debian Archive Kit which is used to manage debian archives in the ftp servers. The generator also takes care of removing the stale cache, so that the servers are always up-to-date with the latest metadata. It creates a tarball of icons of all the deb packages and also makes a cache of the screenshots, these can be used by the AppStream Library to give users valuable informartion about a package.

What kind of data is extracted

From the .desktop files fields such as Icon,Name,MimeTypes etc are extracted, and kept in yaml format. For eg, Icon field gives us valuable information about the location of the Icon in the deb file.Using the value from the Icon fiels we can extract the Icon from the deb file and keep it for further use. In the same way,xml files are read to extract valuable information like the binaries and libraries installed into a location. One interesting information is the screenshots tag which is later used to fetch the screenshots from the specified urls and keep them in cache, so that they can be used by some client applications. All this data are stored in yaml format, and also each deb package can have several .desktop files and in general one or two(at max) xml files.

You can see here to have an idea of how the data looks like !

I have also given some links below which are must reads to understand DEP-11 and AppStream in more detail.

There will be further changes to DEP-11 as AppStream changes and I’ll keep posting !