Announce: Comprehensive Source Database makes Distributor's and Sysop's life easier

[Enrico Weigelt]

Announcing the Comprehensive Source Database Project
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==> 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 at metux.de by writing
"subscribe oss-qm" to majordomo at 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/


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 The OSS-QM Project - Comprehensive Source Database
 
 Official contact: oss-qm-discuss at metux.de
 Website:          http://sourcefarm.metux.de/
 Maintainer:       Enrico Weigelt, metux IT service <weigelt at metux.de>
 Infrastructure:   metux IT service - http://www.metux.de
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