Debian Package of the Day

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."

Comments

Not really official

[duncf]

Just to make things clear, this isn't an official Debian project webpage. The debian.net subdomains are available to Debian Developers to do their own thing, and occasionally sites will migrate from debian.net to debian.org, if they get accepted by the community as "official". Debian Planet started out this way, at least.

I'd better prefer package comparations

[turbidostato]

My "problem" with debian packages is not to find them (apt-cache makes quite a good job on it) but comparing "competing" packages, and I don't know about any resource on Debian on this.

Just an example: I don't mind about an explanation on how good apt-cacher is (a Debian package to cache access to Debian repositories), but it would be much better a side-to-side comparation among apt-cacher, apt-proxy and squid on repository-caching functions so I can use it to make my opinion for my environment.

or...

[bcrowell]

You could bookmark the debian package-of-the-day page, or you could bookmark this freshmeat page, which takes you to a random project. If you use other OSes in addition to Linux, the freshmeat one might be more useful. Freshmeat also has ratings, user comments, etc.

Re:OMG

[RAID10]

Bug reports are actually sent to bugs.debian.org
ATM there's only 72 rc-bugs to be squashed before Etch will be ready (Debian-installer rc2 will be out soon too). Soon enough the most stable Linux distribution ever is released. Thanks to all debian developers around the world.

top o' the day

[OriginalArlen]

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.

Re:top o' the day

[Rakshasa Taisab]

This must be why so few people know about the xargs command...

package comparations - with debtags

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Try PopCon

[moyix]

Give the Debian Popularity Contest a shot. It's an opt-in thing that reports what packages you have installed back up to a central server, which then produces stats on the popularity of packages. This won't necessarily tell you what package is *better*, but it will tell you which one is more widely used (and hence probably more supported).

http://popcon.debian.org/