[57north-discuss] [57north-announce] Aprils Tuesday

[Iain R. Learmonth]

Hi All,

On Tue, Apr 07, 2015 at 09:46:56AM +0100, Tom Jones wrote:
> If you are heading in please reply to this email. This is your weekly chance to
> show off the awesome projects that you are working on, ask for help or just
> talk about your life.

I will be heading in. I will be working on a unified API and Python library
for getting information about software from multiple Linux distributions to
help developers collaborate on bugs and upstream issues. My targets to begin
with are Debian, Fedora and Nix. I hope to add Ubuntu and pkgsrc support
once I have completed the API specification.

If you have a favourite distribution that's not listed, please tell me about
it and we'll see what needs to be done to get it included. More
collaboration is a good thing.

As an example, there is a package in Debian that has a security issue. I
handled getting a CVE assigned for this and then notified the Fedora
maintainer for the package. As upsteam has disappeared, the Fedora
maintainer would likely have never heard of this issue.

When I appeared on the fedora-hams mailing list, an upstream developer was
looking at getting his software packaged but was unaware that we already had
plans to package it in Debian. We've arranged to get the Debian package
sorted and smooth out any upstream issues to make life easier for the Fedora
developers.

The reverse has happened with another package, where Fedora worked with
upstream to resolve licensing issues and now it will be easier for it to be
packaged in Debian.

Given the number of Debian derivatives and the number or RPM-based
distributions that use Fedora's EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux)
repositories, this will hopefully have a large positive impact on the Linux
world, but it does require that people are engaged in the collaboration. So
far the results look promising.

Iain.

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