Fedora has launched a new site that acts as a portal to view all packages within the Fedora repositories. They have also created a system that lets you tag packages in the repositories as part of a social gaming experience.

You can think of Fedora Packages like a social networking system, where instead of profiles of people, you’ll find profiles of packages. The front overview page shows the description of the package, what versions of the package are in what Fedora and/or EPEL releases, and a link to the upstream. I am hoping that in the next cut we can work with Vincent and the OpenSuSE folks on extending our upstream metadata. Luke worked with me on the patch viewer, which not only gives you a full listing of all Fedora patches against any given patch with the committer and commit date, but also lets you view a diffstat per patch as well as across all patches for the package. You can also view the full content of the patches with code syntax highlighting inline in the page.

Luke did a lot of research on how to best improve our search and concluded that the GPL-licensed Xapian Open Source Search Engine Library was the way to do it. Fedora PackageDB has a tagging system and yum is able to access those tags, so Ralph Bean pre-populated the Xapian index with the tags from Fedora PackageDB. Not all packages in PackageDB have tags, though. What to do? Well, Spot had this great idea for us to build a game that would let you both add tags to packages in Fedora as well as vote up or down those tags added by others, and win points (and hopefully soon badges) for your efforts. It was a stretch goal for us because we really weren’t sure if we’d have Fedora Packages up and running in a development environment and all the core features ready in time – time was very short, especially with the Christmas holiday break – but we managed to pull it together with J5′s initial javascript prototype and a Herculean effort by Ralph Bean, who not only got the basic game mechanics and prototype in tip-top shape but who also implemented gravatar icon support, a leader board, and even vim keybindings!

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Fedora has launched a new site that acts as a portal to view all packages within the Fedora repositories. They have also created a system that lets you tag packages in the repositories as part of a social gaming experience. You can think of Fedora Packages like a social networking system, where instead of profiles ...