AppStream is a collaborative effort for enhancing the way we interact with the software repositories provided by the distribution by standardizing sets of additional metadata.
AppStream provides the foundation to build software-center applications. It additionally provides specifications for things like an unified software metadata database, screenshot services and various other things needed to create user-friendly application-centers for software distributions.
You can find a C/GLib based reference implementation of the full specification at github.com/ximion/appstream (https://github.com/ximion/appstream) and report bugs about the implementation as well as the specification itself at the issue tracker (https://github.com/ximion/appstream/issues). The project also provides a web form for the simple creation of metainfo XML files for upstream maintainers at freedesktop.org/software/appstream/metainfocreator (https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/metainfocreator/#/).
Copyright © 2012-2021 Matthias Klumpp. This material may only be distributed subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), V1.2 with no invariant sections or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.txt (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.txt)).