@lexoyo I'm very well aware, at this point I know all the traps of JSON and YAML 1.1/1.2, and most of XML as well ;-)

Sometimes you still get into freak accidents with user-supplied data though, for cases nobody considered before (AppStream is totally fine with this, but our validators at Debian rightfully weren't).

I fixed it by adding some heuristics to libappstream to explicitly quote something we know should be a string if it starts with a digit/punctuation (for performance reasons).

I would just like to simply quote every string and be done with it (it's also more JSON-like). But keeping the more minimal style instead of changing how the emitted AppStream YAML looks like (breaking tests) was the better, more conservative fix. - For now.

@mirlo Ehm... There should have been a message after you registered, linking you to this: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/-/wikis/home#how-can-i-contribute-to-an-existing-project-or-create-a-new-one

Did you get your account verified? If so and you are still experiencing this, then it has to be a bug, otherwise you just need to get verified.

@deobald I bet the engineers who made the Windows Registry wished they had implemented some kind of ownership semantic into it, instead of making it a place to store random data from who-knows-where 😅

At least on Linux, apps were always restricted to only write into some locations (with $HOME being the wild-west of data littering, but not the entire filesystem at least :-P )

@deobald It is kind of insane from a Linux engineer's perspective, especially in 2026. But MSI was created in 1999 for Windows, which doesn't have the strict(-ish) filesystem layout UNIX has, where software was shipped on CDs, computers were slower with expensive disk space, and in an environment where Microsoft had already invented the Windows Registry.

So I guess it made sense back then... I'm glad we didn't accidentally create something like this for Linux 😅