AppStream CLI

Notes

This release marks the libappstream-compose API as stable.

This release introduces a new, lightly sandboxed (on Linux) media worker for appstream-compose and switches to VIPS for image processing. Please report any issues you may find! The sandbox can be disabled by setting ASC_NO_SANDBOX=1 in the environment. The image formats XPM, TIFF and BMP will no longer be read by Compose, and will be rejected unconditionally.

This release introduces <heading>My headline!</heading> markup for AppStream descriptions. Older versions will remove this markup, so only use it if your target clients have a recent version of AppStream.

Features

• compose: Create AscMedia for isolated out-of-process media handling using asc-mediaworker
• compose: Process images, fonts & videos via the media worker
• Generalize path segment validation, use it in the compose media worker
• compose: Switch from using GdkPixbuf to VIPS for image processing
• compose: Harmonize supported formats, don't read XPM/TIFF/BMP
• compose: Make JPEG-XL the default image output format
• compose: Implement basic support for FreeBSD
• compose: Rely on VIPS for SVG support, drop our dedicated librsvg path
• compose: Make image-targets and image batch-processing public API
• compose: Expose the source-icon convention and a hint-tag lookup as public API
• compose: Drop unstable-API marker
• compose: Don't create image thumbnails that aren't a substantially smaller
• compose: Only transfer pre-opened fds and no more directory fd to the worker
• compose: Implement a basic sandbox for the mediaworker using Landlock
• compose: Use RESTRICT_SELF_TSYNC and block UDP access on newer Landlock
• compose: Mix the output image format type into the GCID
• compose: Make AscUnit a proper abstract class
• compose: Improve API documentation
• Always sanitize whitespaces in keywords and drop empty ones
• Assume a language element without percentage means full translation
• news-to-metainfo: Support a details URL in the YAML variant
• news-convert: Support inline Markdown in news text
• news-convert: Support headers in XML<->YAML/NEWS/Markdown conversions
• ascli: news-convert: Support standalone release XML as source/target
• Whitespace-sanitize all description markup we read
• Output descriptions as literals in YAML and wrap markup ourselves

Specification

• docs: Document the appstreamcli news file conversion helper
• Implement support for headings in description markup

Bugfixes

• meson: Set _POSIX_C_SOURCE on Linux only
• compose: Fix a race where units were deleting each other's icon directories
• compose: Fix documentation and introspection annotation issues
• compose: Drop dead public API, make some API private
• compose: Sharpen with libvips instead of a hand-rolled unsharp mask
• compose: Only read AVIF from HEIF containers, never HEIC
• compose: Fix double-free crash when processing fonts
• compose: Guard against bad locale in path names
• compose: Ensure component-IDs are safe to use in filesystem paths
• compose: Escape values for HTML reports, and create proper plain-text if needed
• compose: Make missing-launchable-desktop-file an error
• Fix a few translator hints that weren't picked up properly
• Don't accept empty strings as URLs
• its: Fix description inline markup translation for release data
• validator: Fix improper use of variadic arguments
• validator: Properly validate component-IDs with random UTF-8 characters
• validator: Abort ID validation after the first invalid character
• pool: Resolve crash if data locations are changed on a loaded pool
• Fix wrong string comparison when detecting arm64 machines
• ascli: Resolve crash when selection is cancelled in install/remove
• Fix another crash when converting invalid description markup to Markdown
• apt: Treat icon tarballs as hostile, instead of trusted
• apt: Fix empty-directory check nuking the icon cache on every refresh
• utils: Ensure we never ever follow symlinks when recursively deleting caches
• xml: Only emit description enumerations for locales that are in them
• cache: Never infinite-recurse when resolving addons for a component
• yaml: Don't leave old header data around when parsing multiple YAML catalogs

Miscellaneous

• ci: fedora: Disable cisco-openh264 repo, it's currently broken on rawhide
• compose: Stop leaking private symbols out of the shared library
• compose: Make hint tag/severity/explanation setters private API
• compose: Seal the global settings explicitly on start
• news-convert: Refactor conversion code for better readability
• ascli: Refactor subcommand dispatch
• meson: Disable analyzer-infinite-loop more broadly for static analysis

Contributors

Matthias Klumpp

Features

• validator: Ensure description markup has no invalid attributes set
• validator: Validate bundle/pkgname values for allowed characters

Bugfixes

• xml: Sanitize description markup when reading and writing it
• yaml/json: Ensure description markup is sanitized when loading/saving it
• meson: Work around wrong library linkage when linking Qt tests
• Allow sealing of component-IDs to safely use them in hash tables and indices
• Ensure we never emit or read an invalid data origin
• Prevent crash when comparing bad version strings that have an epoch after rev
• Fix potential out-of-bounds read in OARS mapping table
• apt: yaml: Harden against potential corrupted YAML / YAML-headers
• compose: Guess a filename even from invalid URLs instead of crashing
• compose: Confine directory unit data reads to the unit's root directory
• compose: Refactor directory unit to use openat2, if possible
• news-convert: Don't crash in case we receive bad freeform YAML news input
• ascli: Guard against bad bundle values when calling "install"

Contributors

Matthias Klumpp

Features

• sysinfo: Implement display size detection on macOS

Bugfixes

• qt: Add back wrong const Component::addBundle for ABI compatibility
• qt: Use strndup for C string-list conversion
• pool: Fix bidirectional wildcard search for modalias provides

Contributors

Matthias Klumpp

Features

• sysinfo: Assume a more modern display for the handset chassis template
• sysinfo: Assume a more modern display for the tablet chassis template
• sysinfo: Initial code to autodetect the display size on Wayland
• sysinfo: Handle fractional display scaling via xdg-output
• Implement support for GCVE as vulnerability database provider
• qt: Sync enum mirrors with the C library
• qt: Add Artifact, Checksum, Reference, Review and Agreement wrappers
• qt: Wrap missing C API on existing classes
• reviews: Add simple interface to fetch ODRS reviews for a component
• reviews: Implement support for submitting reviews

Specification

• docs: Suggest using the longest display side for maximum size constraints

Bugfixes

• Make GResources we need outlive main thread destruction
• pool: Properly implement cancellation of load operations
• sysinfo: Fix display-length setter overriding the shortest edge
• relation-check: Don't zero the score if a required check errored
• curl: Harden downloader by restricting protocols to only HTTP(S)
• curl: Allow making POST requests and changing the user agent
• curl: Fix retry-loop data corruption and don't blindly retry POST requests
• yaml: Fix potential crashes when encountering missing relation entry values
• yaml: Adjust tests and emitter to work around libfyaml string-quoting change
• yaml: Ensure version relations are consistently quoted
• qt: Fix buffer overrun in stringListToCharArray

Miscellaneous

• ci: freebsd: Switch from Cirrus to GitHub Actions
• ci: Update Ubuntu LTS to 26.04

Contributors

Gleb Popov, Matthias Klumpp