
AppStream
=========
<img align="right" src="docs/images/src/png/appstream-logo.png">

AppStream is a collaborative effort for making machine-readable software metadata easily available to programs that need it.
It is part of the Freedesktop ecosystem and provides a convenient way to retrieve information about available software,
making it one of the building blocks for modern software centers.

AppStream consists of a specification to describe individual software component metadata in XML (so-called MetaInfo files), as well as
a derived specification for a metadata-collection format to provide a list of these metadata entries in XML or YAML for easy
consumption by software centers and other tools which need to know about available software in a repository.
In addition to the metadata specification, AppStream specifies a set of related features to help providing better metadata for software
repositories (primarily in Linux distributions).
This reference implementation of AppStream provides a shared library to work with these metadata files, features to index and query their
data quickly, as well as other useful related functionality to make building programs which work with software metadata very easy.

This repository contains:
 * the AppStream specification
 * the `appstreamcli` utility to access and edit metadata, manipulate caches, show diagnostic information, etc. (see `man appstreamcli`)
 * a GLib/GObject based library for reading and writing AppStream metadata in XML and YAML, accessing the system data pool, and auxiliary functionality
...

Homepage:
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/releases/
