We keep a database containing structured information about all apps we’re shipping. Architecture-wise, this is a set of plain text files in a version control system. It’s the heart of our data-driven app building- and distribution- systems. Maybe you’ve heard someone mentioning F-Droid Data already. Occasionally we also refer to this as app metadata.

We started out with a custom domain specific language (DSL) for storing our metadata files using GIT for version control. Not very surprisingly our custom DSL looks a lot like the popular markup language YAML. That’s why we started supporting to store app metadata in .yml file format a year ago.

We’re finally deprecating .txt metadata support altogether. Our amazing packaging team is almost done moving our entire database to .yml.

To keep things easy, we will continue to ship a handy sub-command so everyone can conveniently convert now deprecated .txt metadata files to .yml:

$ fdroid rewritemeta --to yml

In the long run, removing .txt metadata support will allow us to get rid of a substantial amount of source-code. This will make maintenance a lot simpler for us and also lower the learning curve for new contributors. It will also make adding new features faster and simplify creating tooling, CI, auditing, metrics, etc.

Additionally, this will make our database more accessible to everyone. We hope to see developers, enthusiasts and scientists to come up with interesting third party tools, use-cases or studies.

Our thanks goes to: Izzy and Bubu for migrating our database and Hans and me (uniqx) for implementing YAML metadata support.