Welcome!
Welcome to the AppStream Generator HTML pages!
These pages exist to provide a user-friendly view on the issues discovered by the AppStream metadata generator while extracting metadata from packages in the Debian archive. They can also be used to take a look at the raw metadata, to spot possible problems with the data itself or the generation process.
Select a suite
trixie
sid
experimental
buster-updates
buster-backports
buster
bullseye-updates
bullseye-backports
bullseye
bookworm-updates
bookworm-backports
bookworm
What is AppStream and DEP-11?
AppStream is a cross-distro XML format to provide metadata for software components and to assign unique identifiers to software.
In Debian, we parse all XML provided by upstream projects as well as other metadata (.desktop-files, ...), and compile a single YAML
metadata file from it, which is then shipped to users via APT.
While the official AppStream specification is based on XML, Debian uses a YAML version of the format for easier use in existing scripts and for better archive integration. This format is called DEP-11, and initially had a much wider scope in enhancing archive metadata than AppStream had. Today AppStream covers that as well, and DEP-11 is only a YAML version of AppStream.
The generated metadata can for example be used by software centers like GNOME Software or KDE Discover to display a user-friendly application-centric
view on the package archive.
It can also be used by other software to find missing plugins, codecs, fonts, etc. or simply by users to install software on any Linux distribution
without knowing the exact package name.
More information
See AppStream @ wiki.d.o for information about AppStream integration and usage in Debian.
The offical AppStream specification can be found at freedesktop.org, a description
of the DEP-11 YAML format is hosted there as well.
You can find the source-code of the AppStream Generator here.
Log files of the generator runs are stored in logs/, machine-readable issue hints can be found in hints/, valid metadata is located in data/ and all exported media is made available via media/.