Fedora Tracker lives again!

[brads at redhat.com (Brad Smith)]

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Hello all,

I've been distributing the attached announcement to various Fedora resources and since I've noticed
some Fedora users here I thought I would pass it on to this list as well. I'm trying to get people
to visit and test for bugs, load-handling, etc, so if you think it would be handy please take a look!

- --Brad


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Fedora Tracker (http://www.fedoratracker.org) has been... less than useful since FC4 came out and
Yum switched to using XMl-based metadata. At the time I was just too busy with my work at Red Hat to
add support for it to the backend so most repositories didn't get indexed. Fortunately that's now
changed. For those unfamiliar with Fedora Tracker, it aims to be a search engine indexing all Fedora
yum repositories on the net.

Lately I've finally gotten to spend some time on the project and, with the help of Hrishikesh Ballal
who responded to a request for assistance and contributed time, ideas and code, I am pleased to
announce that a new revision of Tracker is online. The backend has been completely rewritten with
support for the new repository format and is implemented in such a way that, given a .repo file with
$basearch and $releasever urls, it will automatically try all supported arch/ver combinations so
that if support for a new arch or ver is added for a known repository it will automatically be indexed.

The main change to the frontend is that it is no longer quite as i386-centric. The architecture
search field has been moved from the "advanced search" page to the main page so x86_64 and ppc users
will have an easier time searching for appropriate packages.

On a less positive note, apt support has been removed. This is partly due to some technical issues I
am having with my web host, partly due to a relative lack of interest in Apt I've seen among Fedora
users and partly to minimize the amount of code I have to support. If enough people yell at me about
this I'll consider changing it.

There are also still a few sporadic bugs that I will nail down as I find time and tons of features I
look forward to implementing including performance enhancements, moving to a templating engine for
the frontend and giving the whole interface a facelift. On that note, I'm still interested in
getting a logo of some sort for the site, so if anyone with the requisite artistic talent would care
to submit something I'll take it under consideration. If I get enough, maybe I'll put them all up
for a vote.

For now this message is just to let people know that Tracker is back in the game and to encourage
Fedora users to to pound away at it, sending bug reports to me via email (brad s _at_ red hat com).
This includes situations where the interface hangs or takes excessively long to complete a query. If
you run into a situation like this and can tell me:

- - What you were doing
- - Approximately what time you did it
- - Whether or not it was reproducible (did it suddenly work when you hit 'reload')

it would be appreciated. Finally, if anyone knows of a repository not in the database, please let me
know.

Thanks, and I hope people find it useful,
- --Brad
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