Infrastructure/LookAndFeel/PackageDbUsageNotes

PackageDB Usage Notes

The version of the packagedb that will be out by F7 will be for packagers, upstream coders, and people who are interested in the development of a particular piece of software within Fedora. The idea is for packagers to be able to change ownership information and set who has the ability to access the packages they're working on. People besides the packager can sign up to be notified about changes to packages or just browse the package listings if they're so inclined.

Post-F7, the development will have two thrusts:

• Integration with Koji. The idea is for Koji and and the packagedb to have one database that knows about all the packages built in Fedora. The GUI's and CLI tools are tentatively supposed to be merged as well, but I don't know enough about Koji to say whether that makes sense.

• Development of a view of packages a la Debian, Gentoo, Fedora Repoview that let's end users browse and search the packages in Fedora. Links to these are listed off of the current packageDB front page: [1]

There's a bunch of other items that people want in it: [2]

but I haven't fit them into the grand scheme of things yet.

Users & Their Tasks

Package Maintainers

• Set who has ability to access the packages they're working on
• Edit ownership information for a package - add new co-maintainers, change branch permissions for maintainers
• Add packages (Package Maintainer requests this. Release Engineering approves the request.)

Upstream Coders

• Everything in all of the above below :)

Anyone Interested in the Development of Particular Pieces of Software

• Everything in all of the above below :)

Release Engineering & Security Team

• Find packages that are in most need of attention - have been neglected by maintainers (?) (auto-nag, timeout, notification)
• Set a package as orphaned
• Find package maintainers/owners that are MIA (auto-nag, timeout, notification)
• Feature tracking
• Approve package addition

All of the Above

• View bugs for owned packages
• Sign up for notifications about package changes
• Modify notification preferences
• Browse package listings
• Look up the owner of a package
• Look up outstanding bugs re: a package (?)
• Search for a particular packe to get info on it
• View information about maintainership by other distros of packages contained in Fedora
• Download a particular version of a packge
• View changelogs for different versions of a package
• Determnine which version of a package is in which versions of the distro
• View other packages related to / depending on any particular package + some basic details about each
• Get information about package's upstream (eg upstream maints, website, repo, etc)