This library provides GObjects and helper methods to make it easy to read and write AppStream metadata. It also provides a simple DOM implementation that makes it easy to edit nodes and convert to and from the standardized XML representation.

What this library allows you to do:

• Read and write compressed AppStream XML files
• Add and search for applications in an application store
• Get screenshot image data and release announcements
• Easily retrieve the best application data for the current locale
• Efficiently interface with more heavy-weight parsers like expat

For more information about what AppStream is, please see the wiki here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Distributions/AppStream/

To install the libappstream-glib library you either need to install the libappstream-glib package from your distributor, or you can build a local copy. To do the latter just do:

dnf install automake autoconf libtool glib-devel \
            docbook-utils gtk-doc gobject-introspection-devel
./autogen.sh
make
make install

If you want to actually generate metadata rather than just consuming it, you probably want to be looking at: https://github.com/hughsie/createrepo_as or if you're completely lost, GNOME Software is a GUI tool that uses this library to implement a software center. See src/plugins/gs-plugin-appstream.c if you want some more examples on using this library where speed and latency really matter.

If you want a new feature, or have found a bug or a way to crash this library, please report as much information as you can to the issue tracker: https://github.com/hughsie/appstream-glib/issues -- patches very welcome.

New functionality or crash fixes should include a test in src/as-self-test.c to ensure we don't regress in the future. New functionality should also be thread safe and also not leak any memory for success or failure cases.

LGPLv2+