standard for creating app stores across distributions
AppStream is a collaborative effort for making machine-readable software
metadata easily available to programs that need it.
It is part of the Freedesktop ecosystem and provides a convenient way to
retrieve information about available software, making it one of the building
blocks for modern software centers.

AppStream consists of a specification to describe individual software component
metadata in XML (so-called MetaInfo files), as well as a derived specification
for a metadata-collection format to provide a list of these metadata entries in
XML or YAML for easy consumption by software centers and other tools which need
to know about available software in a repository.
In addition to the metadata specification, AppStream specifies a set of related 
eatures to help providing better metadata for software repositories (primarily
in Linux distributions).

This reference implementation of AppStream provides a shared library to work
with these metadata files, features to index and query their data quickly, as
well as other useful related functionality to make building programs which work
with software metadata very easy.

Maintainer: Antoine Jacoutot <ajacoutot@openbsd.org>

WWW: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Distributions/AppStream/
