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?
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).
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.
Nice, but in addition to that, haven’t you thought about implementing something more interactive such as ratings, comments and that sort of thing?
I don’t want to be the devil’s advocate, but that’s already in pkgdb 🙂
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.
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.
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.
In Fedora latest upstream versions are currently checked by me as explained here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upstream_release_monitoring
There are also links to othere similar projects that I know of. If there is some information available about the openSUSE efforts,
Currently 2009 Fedora packages are being monitored.
One good base for coordination would be a mapping of different package names in different distributions. Iirc someone from Fedora mentioned working on this a long time ago on the devel mailing list. This would easily allow to share upstream version info or the meta data to identify new upstream releases.
I am a little bit sad to see how much duplication we have. Mageia use a project called youri for that : http://check.mageia.org/updates.html
And we do have the whole configuration published in puppet format on http://svnweb.mageia.org/adm/puppet/modules/youri-check/
( that just yaml ). The code is on http://youri.zarb.org/
Also, on the side of “social network for package”, my roommate wrote : http://sophie.zarb.org/ , it indexes fedora ( among others ), provides xml-rpc interfaces, is free and written in perl/catalyst. There is also some frontends to the db like http://mageia-app-db.tuxette.fr/projects/mageia-app-db/wiki, that as presented during Nuremberg meeting for the Appstream project.
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?
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.
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.
An interactive dependency tree? Sounds awesome!
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.
[…] 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. […]
[…] 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. […]
[…] on the Fedora Packages web application project […]
[…] 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 […]