Only available though Zero Install

I still sometimes see people complain that something is "only available through Zero Install". The thing is, the packages downloaded by AddApp work just fine on their own. An 'interface file' is just a list of links to tarballs (much like a web page, but machine readable rather than HTML).

But why not make the feeds human readable too? Add some XSLT and they can be! Load this in your browser:

• Sample feed

It looks like a normal HTML page, but if you do View Page Source in your browser, you'll see that it's actually an injector feed file.

Well, almost. Feeds have to be GPG-signed for security, but a GPG-signed file isn't XML and so can't be read by a browser. So, what you see there is actually the new injector feed format (which will be supported by version 0.18 when it comes out), where the signature is in an XML comment block at the end.

It's a base64-encoded version of a GPG detached signature, not a W3C XML-Signature, because implementing that spec would be massively complicated. It's encoded to prevent people putting XML special characters in it (comments in the signature itself aren't checked by GPG, so you don't want to let them near the main code unescaped).