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Debian Package of the Day

Posted by kdawson on from the even-got-an-RSS-feed dept.

flok writes "The Debian project has started a new webpage: the 'Debian package of the day.' It does what it says — every day another package from the Debian repository is posted with an elaborate description and some nice screenshots. As Debian (and all the other distributions as well) contains way too many packages for it to be feasible to inspect all of them yourself, this is then a nice way of learning about all kinds interesting software packages."

3 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. top o' the day by OriginalArlen · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Bored? Looking to kill five minutes? Nothing new on the newsfeeds? Start here...:

    $ ls -l /usr/bin/a* I bet you don't know what half of those do. Go hit the man pages (or google up docs on anything your system for which you don't have the manual.) Rinse & repeat for b,c,.. I've been doing this for years & still find plenty of new stuff.
    --

    Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
  2. idea for enhancement by fragbait · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Along with the package of the day, put a "similar packages" list of links.

    -fragbait

  3. package comparations - with debtags by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Use debtags for that, e.g. you have vim:
    $ apt-cache show vim | grep '^Tag:'
    Tag: devel::editor, interface::text-mode, role::program, scope::application, uitoolkit::ncurses, use::editing, works-with::text

    then you can search for packages with similar tags
    $ debtags search '(works-with::text && use::editing && interface::text-mode)'

    and, whoa, you get quite a lot of stuff, and the first entry, abiword-plugins, seems to be mistagged too :) - But the concept seems sound. IIRC debian also allows wiki-like editing of the tag-db somewhere.

    HTH

    P.S.: Yes, emacs is among the results:
    emacs21 - The GNU Emacs editor
    [..]
    emacs21-nox - The GNU Emacs editor (without X support)
    qemacs - Small emacs clone editor with HTML and DocBook editing support
    xemacs21-bin - highly customizable text editor -- support binaries
    zile - very small emacs-like editor