[SGVLUG] FC repository searches

[Jeff Carlson]

Dustin Laurence wrote:
> Someone on #sgvlug pointed me here
> 
> http://www.fedoratracker.org/

Well, that one is much better than rpmfind or rpmseek or whatever others
are out there.  The beauty of fedoratracker is that it is focused on
Fedora, whereas the others are just any distro and the ugly of that is
of course dependency hell.

> Which did the job pretty well--apparently Ekigia is in the main distro,
> which as far as my usage of FC is concerned is the Right Answer.

Correct.  My 10 seconds of research found ekiga-2.0.2-6.i386.rpm in the
latest rawhide.  I would bet at least 10 cents that the release number
(the -6 part) will be different before the release in October (probably
-7.fc6 as that's the direction we're heading).

> Either that or move to .debs. :-)

<<shudder>>

> It's especially odd when the obvious advantage to RPM-based distros is
> easy package availability (though I think any advantage there is largely
> an illusion as far as Debian and maybe Gentoo are concerned).

How does it go?  "Nobody holds a monopoly on bad ideas."  Something like
that?

I don't think the original goal of RPM was to have universal package
availability, but instead to have a database of what was installed, the
ability to block installations with missing dependencies, and a method
to remove all the files from a single installation cleanly.

Today's goals, particularly regarding the Fedora project, are even
broader.  The porting of apt to RPM and following adoption of yum by the
project have made the newer goals more achievable.  The plague build
system adds even more refinement to the overall view (plague attempts to
build with as minimal a set of include files and libraries available, to
identify the dependencies).

But keep in mind, Fedora didn't start where Debian did.  I don't think
Fedora is trying to get where Debian is or is headed.  For anybody who
wants to just complain that Fedora isn't Debian, fine, run Debian.

Don't get me wrong, if we're missing a page on fedoraproject.org that
describes the contents of every package in Core and Extras, then we need
that.  I know that FreshRPMs, DAG, and ATrpms all have such pages.  Even
livna.org has one, and it's the officially not official repository.

Well, I did find this, though I wonder which sites are using it:

repoview.noarch                          0.5.2-1.fc5            extras
Matched from:
repoview
RepoView creates a set of static HTML pages in a yum repository for easy
browsing.
http://linux.duke.edu/projects/mini/repoview

And I don't see anything about this on the site map.  I'm going to ask
around to a few of the team members and see if someone can comment.