Announcing the Comprehensive Source Database Project ------------------------------------------------------ ==> What's it all about ? The CSDB project provides an uniform database with dozens of packages, their releases and tarball locations. Using this database, package maintainers and self-building sysops do not need to keep track of tarball urls by their own. They simply query the database by package name and canonical version number. CSDB also provides an simple URL redirector which provides an canonical URL for accessing certain package+version tarball and kicks you to an random download URL. This for example allows automatic buildsystems to ==> How does it work ? Lots of crawlers scan websites and ftp servers of many projects and feed in the found tarball URLs into our database. While feeding in, the data is brought into an strictly canonical form. We've got several classes of data objects: * packages -> identifier, description, ... * per package: releases -> canonical version, upstream version, ... * per release: src_url -> source-format, url, ... Users can access this database via various interfaces, ie. + Human-readble user interface: http://sourcefarm.metux.de/webfront/?show=world + Various robot interfaces: http://wiki.metux.de/public/SourceFarm/robots The robot interfaces are for automated systems, ie. system builders. For example, the URL redirector provides an uniform URL syntax for fetching an tarball of some given package in some given (canonical) version. It does an database lookup and kicks the client to the actual URL. Package maintainers can simply use these URLs instead of the actual ones and so don't have to cope with individual release URLs anymore. ==> How can I contribute ? Contributions are always welcomed :) Please join our mailinglist oss-qm-discuss@metux.de by writing "subscribe oss-qm" to majordomo@metux.de. You may freely use the wiki at http://sourcefarm.metux.de but please always drop not to the maillist if you wrote something. ===> Further stuff: [ ] How CSDB was born http://www.metux.de/articles/oss/csdb/how-csdb-was-born [ ] CSDB Website http://sourcefarm.metux.de/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The OSS-QM Project - Comprehensive Source Database Official contact: oss-qm-discuss@metux.de Website: http://sourcefarm.metux.de/ Maintainer: Enrico Weigelt, metux IT service <weigelt@metux.de> Infrastructure: metux IT service - http://www.metux.de ----------------------------------------------------------------------