Day: March 28, 2019

In the next release of appstream-glib the appstream-util validate requirements got changed, which might make your life easier, or harder — depending if you already pass or fail the validation. The details are here but the rough jist is that we’ve relaxed a lot of the style rules (e.g. starts with a capital letter, ends with a full stop, less than a certain number of chars, etc), and made stricter some of the more important optional parts of the specification. For instance, requiring <content_rating> for any desktop or console application.

Even if you don’t care upstream, the new validation will soon be turned on for any apps built in Flathub, and downstream “packagers” will be pestering you for details as updates are now failing. Although only a few apps fail, some of the missing metadata tags are important enough to fail building. To test your app right now with the new validator:

$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists gnome-nightly https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo
$ flatpak install gnome-nightly org.gnome.Sdk
$ flatpak run --command=bash --filesystem=home:ro org.gnome.Sdk//master
# appstream-util validate /home/hughsie/Code/gnome-software/data/appdata/org.gnome.Software.appdata.xml.in
# exit

Of course, when the next tarball is released it’ll be available in your distribution as normal, but I wanted to get some early sanity checks in before I tag the release.

The LVFS is now an official Linux Foundation project! I did a mini-interview if you want some more details about where the project came from and where it’s heading. I’m hoping the move to the Linux Foundation gives the project a lot more credibility with existing LF members, and it certainly takes some of the load from me. I’ll continue to develop the lvfs-website codebase as before, and still be the friendly face when talking to OEMs and ODMs.

In the short term, not much changes, although you might start see some rebranding of the website itself. The server is also moving from a little VM in AMS to a fully scalable orchestrated thing maintained by people who actually understand how to be a sysadmin. If you’re interested in what’s happening on the LVFS, be sure to join the announcement mailing list. We’re averaging about 450,000 firmware downloads a month, and still growing steadily, with more and more vendors joining every month.

In related news, there’s lots of new firmware on the LVFS, much of it addressing serious CVEs on lots of different laptop models. If you’ve not updated recently, now is the time to fix that.