Giving away distromatch

debian debtags eng pdo sw

at last year's Fosdem I [[tried to inject a lot of energy into distromatch|talks/20120204-Fosdem]] but shortly afterwards I've had to urgently rewrite the nm.debian.org website.

After Lars Wirzenius GTDFH talks in Bologna and Varese I wrote a tool which, among other things, is able to scan my home dir and list how many projects I'm working on.

The output was scary. Like, they are too many. Like, I couldn't even recite the list out of memory. And since I couldn't do that, I had no idea there were so many. And I kept being stressful because I couldn't manage to take care of them all properly.

Now that I became conscious of the situation, it's time to deal with it like a grown up, and politely back off from some of my irresponsible responsibilities.

Distromatch is one of them. It had just [[started as a proof of concept prototype|2011/debian/distromatch]], and I had the vision that it could be the basis for a fantastic culture of sharing and exchange of information across distributions.

I need to distinguish the vision from the responsibility. I still have that vision for distromatch, but I cannot take responsibility for making it happen.

So I am giving it up to anyone who has the time and resources to pick up that responsibility.

Current status

It works well enough as a prototype. I believe it can successfully map a large enough slice of packages, that one can prototype stuff based on it.

I have for example used it to export the Debtags categories for other distros, and the resulting file looked big enough to be used for prototyping category-based features on distributions that don't have them yet.

I think it also works well enough to support a few common use cases, like sharing screenshots, or doing most of the work of converting dependency lists from a distro to another.

And finally, anyone can deploy it, and work on it.

Existing data sources

Everything I index in the Debian distromatch deployment is available at http://dde.debian.net/exports/distromatch/. The rpm-based data in there comes from an export script I wrote that runs on Sophie, but which I cannot maintain properly.

This is an experimental export of Fedora and OpenSUSE data: http://tmp.vuntz.net/misc/distromatch/distromatch-opensuse-fedora.tar

All existing export scripts are found in distromatch git repo on gitorious.

Contacts I gathered at Fosdem

At Fosdem I devoted quite some work to get contacts from all possible distributions and software repositories, so that distromatch could be hooked into them. Here is a dump of what I have collected:

Some of those contacts may have "expired" in the meantime: I wouldn't assume all of them still remember talking with me, although most probably still do.

My commitment for the time being

I am happy to commit, at the moment, to maintaining a working data export for Debian data. I can take responsibility for making it so that the Debian data for it stays up to date, and to fix it asap if it isn't the case.

I hope that now someone can take distromatch over from me, and make it grow to achieve its great potential.