# AppStream-Glib

This library provides GObjects and helper methods to make it easy to read and write AppStream metadata. It also provides a simple DOM implementation that makes it easy to edit nodes and convert to and from the standardized XML representation.

What this library allows you to do:

- Read and write compressed AppStream XML files
- Add and search for applications in an application store
- Get screenshot image data and release announcements
- Easily retrieve the best application data for the current locale
- Efficiently interface with more heavy-weight parsers like expat

For more information about what AppStream is, please see the wiki.

## Getting Started

To install the libappstream-glib library you either need to install the `libappstream-glib` package from your distributor, or you can build a local copy. To do the latter just do:

    dnf install automake autoconf libtool glib-devel
    ./autogen.sh
    make
    make install

## More Information

If you want to actually generate metadata rather than just consuming it, you probably want to be looking at createrepo_as or if you're completely lost, GNOME Software is a GUI tool that uses this library to implement a software center. See `src/plugins/gs-plugin-appstream.c` if you want some more examples on using this library where speed and latency really matter.

## Hacking

If you want a new feature, or have found a bug or a way to crash this library, please report as much information as you can to the issue tracker - patches very welcome.

New functionality or crash fixes should include a test in `src/as-self-test.c` to ensure we don't regress in the future. New functionality should also be thread safe and also not leak *any* memory for success or failure cases.

## License

LGPLv2+