a better webinterface to our packages (Was: Re: New Fedora Extras Steering Committee chair)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Am Samstag, den 14.01.2006, 10:11 -0500 schrieb seth vidal: 
> On Sat, 2006-01-14 at 15:46 +0100, Chris Chabot wrote:
> > One thing i would love to see in Fedora Extra's portofolio of services
> > is a webpage with all the packages listed, plus their summaries, with a
> > click-thru to a full %description, download links for src.rpm, and links
> > for the various FC? releases they have been build for, and a link to the
> > %{url} of the package

I agree with this. 

> you mean like this:
> http://fedoraproject.org/extras/4/i386/repodata/

This is nice, but this is arch-specific (i386 in this case) and not even
links to the src.rpms. As I said before in a thread one or two month
ago: I really think we should have a additional interface (for mirrors
that don't mirror all archs) that links to all packages (e.g. src.rpm,
i386, x86_64, ppc) similar to what freshrpms does.

This is in fact quite easy afaics: Run createrepo and repoview in the
dir that later is uploaded to http://fedoraproject.org/extras/4/ -- this
will create a repo (http://fedoraproject.org/extras/4/repodata) that
probably nobody {will,should} use (because it's quite large), but the
individual package-websites in repoview
(http://fedoraproject.org/extras/4/repodata/repoview) then will link to
the src.rpm and the all the binary packages for i386, x86_64, ppc on one
page -- sililar to what freshrpms has.

This would solve parts of the problem -- there is still no central point
of entry from outside with a defined static URL from where you could
jump to the packages in the different extras trees for various core
releases. 

But we need something like this: Upstream authors of application foo
then simply could place something like this on his website for foo:

"Packages for Fedora Core are in Fedora Extras and can be installed by
running
yum install foo
Further informations how to use Fedora Extras, links to src.rpms, binary
packages and the current state of foo in Fedora Extras can be found at
foo's Fedora Extras Webpage at:
http://fedoraproject.org/extras/packages/foo.html
(stupid name, anyone any better idea? That page of course needs to link
to the repoview files).

Long description. I should make it shorter: "In the long term I want a
web interface with features similar to that from debian (for an example
see http://packages.debian.org/stable/admin/at )"

> While it doesn't have the ability to annotate them I'm not sure how good
> of an idea annotating the packages is anyway. I'd be afraid of having to
> monitor all the spam and crap there. 

Agreed.

> > Preferably with some intergrated wiki (like?) functionality where people
> > can describe more about the package, provide feedback, and usefull hints
>
> feedback should go in bugzilla. useful hints might be valuable but again
> - weighed against the spam?

The biggest problem IMHO: Pages in the wiki would probably have to
created and maintained manually.
-- 
Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info>