For a few years now Appstream and AppData adoption has been growing. We’ve got client applications like GNOME Software consuming the XML files, and we’ve got several implementations of metadata generators for a few distros now. We’ve also got validation tools we’re encouraging upstream applications to use.
The upshot of this was the same code was being duplicated across 3 different projects of mine, all with different namespaces and slightly different defined names. Untangling this mess took a good chunk of last week, and I’ve factored out 2759 lines of code from gnome-software, 4241 lines from createrepo_as, and the slightly less impressive 178 lines from appdata-tools.
The new library has a simple homepage, and so far a single release. I’d encourage people to check this out and provide early comments, as as soon as gnome-software branches for 3-12 I’m going to switch it to using this. I’m also planning on switching createrepo_as and and appdata-tools for the next releases too so things like jhbuild modulesets need to be updated and tested by somebody.
Appstream-Glib 0.1.0 provides just enough API to make sense for a first release, but I’m going to be continuing to abstract out useful functionality from the other projects to share even more code. I’ve spent a few long nights profiling the XML parsing code, and I’m pleased to say the load time of gnome-software is 160ms faster with this new library, and createrepo_as completes the metadata generation 4 minutes faster. Comments, suggestions and patches very welcome. There’s a Fedora package linked from the package review bug if you’d rather test that. Thanks.