Matthias Klumpp

I will talk about software bundling solutions, mainly Flatpak (XdgApp) and Limba, which problems they actually solve and why solving these issues is important for the Linux ecosystem as a whole. I will explain how bundling is implemented in the shiny new solutions available on Linux, and what we as distributor could do to make software bundles suck less and keep the distribution relevant. Additionally, I'll explain which roles sandboxing (Flatpak, Bubblewrap) plays in the big picture.

Since last year, Debian supports the AppStream specification for providing machine readable metadata for any software component available in the Linux distribution. At time, the data is primarily used by GNOME Software and KDE Discover to display an user-friendly catalogue of installable applications. But this is not all we can do with the new metadata: It can be used to automatically detect and install missing firmware and drivers, match applications between distributions and allow upstream projects to track them across different distribution releases and other interesting tasks like automatically checking installed applications for vulnerabilities or installing missing libraries and Python modules automatically in a distro-agnostic way.

The talk will explain what AppStream is today and how it is implemented in Debian, as well as giving some statistics on the availability and evolution of metadata. It will also go into detail on usecases for the metadata, challenges in writing it and future plans, like support for fonts and more automatization in data generation.