Goals

• Ease packages discovery
• Simplify download
• Check dependancies
• Autoupgrade

Principles

• Database of indexed packages
• Metadata exported as HTML and RDF
• Web interface
• Client tool to automate lookup
• Basic autoupgrade

Implementation

• Rpmfind.net server
• Rpm2html scan to build a cross index
• Exported as HTML and RDF
• rpmfind tool
  • XML parser
  • HTTP + FTP client code
  • Lookup the local base
  • Fetches metadata to find/select packages
• Mirroring of RDF
  • Regenerates HTML pages mirrors
  • Local metadata mirrors

Status

• rpmfind.net indexes approx 60000 packages
• 6 millions HTTP hits/months
• 2 MByte/s downloads
• dozen of mirrors

Todo

• Improve the dependencies checking
• Switch to a database based setup
• Improve the autoupgrade mode
• Augment the distribution/mirrors/people metadata

Future

• Scalability
• Remove dependancy on central point of failure
• Switch to the next metadata generation