The Fedora Tracker

[mhelios]

The other day I posted a link to a list of packages with their locations etc. Well I introdue one better now.

Brad Smith of Red Hat has been working on a project for 6 months that he recently released called The Fodora Tracker Project. It's among other uses a web interface where you can input the name of a package you want or a description of it if you don't know the name and it will provide a list of packages in available Fedora yum/apt repos sorted in order from Core packages to Fedora Extras to third party repos.

Instead of me trying to explain all it's usefulness, go to here and try it out! It's a brilliant idea. :)
http://academy.phpwebhosting.com/cgi-bin/tracker/tracker.py

See his announcements here:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-March/msg00796.html
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-March/msg00844.html

[Ug]

Useful.

[Avatraxiom]

This looks really great. This will probably get a FAQ link. :-)

-M

[ghenry]

I also put a review up on Fedoranews.org too.

[kbradl1]

I would like to see something similar to the debian style of package tracking:
-there is one official repository (and many mirrors) which contains all of the official and external packages. This way you don't need 20-sum entries in your yum.conf

-developers are assigned specific packages to control and update. this way there is less duplication of effort across the repositories.

Of cource starting such a project would be huge, but it would give Fedora the same centralized focus as Debian, which is what makes Debian one of the best distros out there IMHO.

[ghenry]

There is talk of this on the fedora-devel list, but until licenses are sorted out, I don't think it will happen.

[mhelios]

Originally posted by Avatraxiom
This looks really great. This will probably get a FAQ link. :-)

-M
Will you be adding the FC2t2 SELinux FAQ to the UnOfficial FAQ? Also a much worthy addition. I posted a link to it in the News forum.

[Avatraxiom]

Wow, I didn't even realize there was such a thing. I thought I was going to have to write it myself. :-)

Yes, there will eventually be an FC2 FAQ, in fact.

I have more time on my hands recently, so you might see more FAQness coming soon if I can get myself up to it.

-M

[Avatraxiom]

Originally posted by ghenry
There is talk of this on the fedora-devel list, but until licenses are sorted out, I don't think it will happen.

fedora.us is supposed to be this thing. They care about licenses, so livna.org is also "part" of that thing.

Then there's a whole 'nother group of folks who have been around forever and are top-notch RPM packagers, like Dag Wieers (dag.wieers.com/packages/), Matthias Saou (freshrpms.net), Axel Thimm (ATRpms) and others. They wanted to do packaging differently than fedora.us, so they kept their own repositories, where they pump out many more RPMs-per-packager (since it's basically one packager that maintains all those RPMs on those sites) than the Fedora Project does.

The barrier at the moment to fedora.us's expansion is that the QA processes are very involved. The quality of the packages that come out of fedora.us is *very* high -- I almost always prefer them over other packages, all other things being equal. Of course, that quality involves a long process and some testers. So, for less popular packages this doesn't happen, and they sit in the queue forever.

-M