From Fedora Project Wiki

Description

AppStream is a standard for creating app stores across distributions, making the process of finding and installing software on Linux-based operating systems more streamlined. It primarily deals with metadata about software components available in the distribution. This test case ensures that the appstream utility correctly manages, displays, and validates the metadata of software components available in the distribution.

Setup

  1. Ensure you have a Fedora system.
  2. Install Package-x-generic-16.pngappstream and Package-x-generic-16.pngappstream-data packages using the package manager: sudo dnf install appstream appstream-data.
  3. Ensure that your system repositories have been updated recently.

How to test

  1. Open a terminal.
  2. Use the command appstreamcli refresh to update the AppStream metadata cache.
  3. Run the command appstreamcli search [keyword], replacing [keyword] with a software name or category, e.g., "editor".
  4. Observe the list of software components that match the search term.
  5. Select a specific software component ID from the search results.
  6. Use the command appstreamcli get [ID], replacing [ID] with the chosen software component ID, to display detailed metadata about that software.
  7. Run the command appstreamcli validate [file_path], replacing [file_path] with the path to an AppStream XML metadata file, to validate its correctness. Note: You might need to have or create an AppStream XML metadata file for this step.

Expected Results

  1. The appstreamcli refresh command should update the metadata cache without errors.
  2. The appstreamcli search should display relevant software components based on the given keyword.
  3. The appstreamcli get command should provide detailed metadata about the selected software component.
  4. The appstreamcli validate command should report any issues with the provided AppStream XML metadata file, or confirm its validity if there are no issues.

Optional

For more in-depth testing:

  1. Test with different software component IDs to ensure consistency in metadata display.
  2. Introduce intentional errors in an AppStream XML metadata file and validate it to check if appstreamcli can correctly identify the issues.
  3. Use the appstreamcli dump command to display raw XML data for a software component.