On Mon, 22 Jul 2019 19:39:10 +0200 Jo Drexl <johannes.dr...@lrz.de> wrote:
[...]
I've seen this error being persistent on some machines, while others
were thrown off repeatedly. A popular suggestion on the internet is to
comment out the test statement and proceed without a refreshed appstream
cache, which seems to work, so I suggest this being rolled out at least
to Debian Stretch.
This is a pretty terrible suggestion, because doing so will break every
software center application on the system, possibly in subtle ways.
A much better solution is to actually find the culprit and fix it -
usually the issue is a PPA or 3rd-party repository injecting invalid
metadata, or some other application on the system installing invalid data.
Try `sudo appstreamcli refresh --force --verbose` to get information on
what's going on (or attach the log to a bug report in case you are
experiencing this issue again).
In the case of newer Debian releases, the issue is actually a regression
in GNOME Software, which is fixed now, once again.
Cheers,
Matthias
