Máirín Duffy

Open design forever.

Fedora package social networking

with 19 comments

Fedora Community v2 Package Profile Thumbnail

So we’ve been talking about a reincarnation of Fedora Community (the app).

Stuff to take note of:

  • Yes, it looks like Facebook. (As my coworker Partha likes to remind me, Fedora had the white lowercase f on blue first. :) )
  • The main navbar for the package is directly under its name & summary. Additional information about the package is available via nav items along the right sidebar, but what we thought was the most important we put in the main navbar. What do you think about which is most important and which is not?
  • In the main navbar we have:
    • Bugs – this will be somewhat like the current bugs tab in Fedora Community.
    • Contents – this will be like running rpm -ql on the package; it will list out all the files it includes.
    • Changelog – a changelog of the package, similar to what Fedora Community has now.
    • Sources – this will show patches we’ve applied if any, the spec file, the git repo for source, the tarball, maybe diffs. (SRPM should be available here too I think.)
    • Relationships – requires / dependences / provides / obsoletes / etc. information. Maybe like this mockup, but less crappy. Also this tab will let you know which package is dating which. I hear inkscape and blender have gotten engaged!
  • There’s a section for upstream information, but we’re not quite sure how we’ll get all of that. There is an XML based format called dope (sp?) that some upstreams use, so maybe that will be involved.
  • A per-package events stream!

There’s more ideas here; see for yourself.

What do you think?

Written by mairin

July 29, 2011 at 9:22 am

19 Responses

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  1. It looks very good, nice work =) Sometimes I find it confusing to grab testing or unstable RPMs from Koji, maybe this page will ease this process. Also, it’ll be good to have a central point from which I can contact the package owners, download new (or old) versions, go to upstream site etc. BTW: in case there are multiple owners, will there be a way to contact them all at once? If not one of the owners might end up receiving much more messages than the others… (unless this is expected, of course).

    Andre Costa

    July 29, 2011 at 10:57 am

    • There is already one at “package name”-owner -at- fedoraproject.org. Using this alias you can reach in one go all of the owners of a package.

      pingou

      August 5, 2011 at 8:19 am

  2. Nice, but in addition to that, haven’t you thought about implementing something more interactive such as ratings, comments and that sort of thing?

    taljurf

    July 29, 2011 at 3:51 pm

    • I don’t want to be the devil’s advocate, but that’s already in pkgdb :-)

      pingou

      August 11, 2011 at 4:24 pm

  3. While I have yet to actively use Fedora on my computer (moving from the linux-introducing Ubuntu to Debian seemed easier at the time), I am constantly impressed with the design aspect of Fedora regarding new contributions.

    The http://fedoraproject.org/ website, the “Your Life on Fedora” user stories, as well as the easy to understand areas where you can get involved. Compelled to action, I submitted a font to Máirín via e-mail and received a quick and kind response.

    This is another example where I think you’re doing things right. It looks great, it makes sense, and it makes me care — and want to care more with action. Congrats!

    My two cents from the outside.

    Kyle Reynolds Conway

    July 29, 2011 at 9:01 pm

  4. I really like this idea. It is a massive improvement on the current package DB that looks a tad outdated. This really brings it into the 21st century.

    Keiran "Affix" Smith

    July 29, 2011 at 10:00 pm

  5. FWIW, in openSUSE, we’ve developed some stuff to fetch latest upstream versions. This definitely needs re-working, but this an area where we could collaborate easily — and it wouldn’t be too hard to add more metadata (like git, svn, etc. URL).

    I’m willing to work with other distros on this. Note that at this time, we don’t have information about that many packages, but it wouldn’t be too hard to crowdsource this.

    There’s also a similar thing done by Debian to watch for new upstream versions, but we didn’t invest enough time to merge the efforts. Yet.

    Vincent Untz

    July 30, 2011 at 3:29 am

  6. Awesome. Much much better then current one. I would say perfect.

    What about?:
    http://screenshots.debian.net/
    And show those screenshots on this page too?

    Miroslav Suchy

    July 31, 2011 at 7:12 am

  7. I like it.

    IMHO the upstream information is VERY important, because it’s deeply tied with the bug information. After all, Fedora is a distribution, and it’s very likely that a bug need to be fixed somewhere else.

    Juanjo

    August 2, 2011 at 1:23 pm

  8. Instead of raw relationships it would be nice to have these mapped to other packages. E.g. have an easy way to navigate to other packages that require the current package or provide a dependency for the current package.

    Also I noticed that the “latest build” information is only interesting, if it is there for all active branches.

    In the active release overview it would be nice to also mark whether updates are already marked to be moved to stable or testing.

    Till Maas

    August 4, 2011 at 4:30 pm

  9. For finding the matching packages in other distros, the following project might help:
    http://www.enricozini.org/2011/debian/distromatch/

    I just found it in my identi.ca stream.

    Till Maas

    August 19, 2011 at 2:21 pm

  10. [...] Okay, quick recap. We’re working on a v2 of Fedora Community called “Fedora Packages.” The usual long-winded Mo blog post about it is available if you’d like to catch up. [...]

  11. [...] Okay, quick recap. We’re working on a v2 of Fedora Community called “Fedora Packages.” The usual long-winded Mo blog post about it is available if you’d like to catch up. [...]

  12. [...] on the Fedora Packages web application project [...]

  13. [...] might remember some earlier posts I’ve made about Fedora package social networking. The background here is that we built a web application called Fedora Community a couple of years [...]

  14. Arg, Mairin if you see this, could you edit my previous comments.

    I meant “package name”-owner -at- fedoraproject.org

    Hopefully it will work this time :)

    pingou

    August 5, 2011 at 8:23 am


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