Free Software Directory:Import

The project enables us to import package information from free software repositories. Long ago a friend put together scripts that we used to import thousands of entries. But thousands upon thousands more could be added if we update the import scripts. The project has been sitting idle for a while now at <https://savannah.gnu.org/p/directory>, but waiting for volunteers to jump in and refine it.

Team Captain: Free Software Foundation

Participants: See https://savannah.gnu.org/project/memberlist.php?group=directory

We have begun the process of importing packages from the main area on Debian GNU/Linux. Right now the process is three steps:

• We have a tool (to be published on savannah shortly) that collects package metadata and outputs a JSON file.
• By hand we clean-up the JSON file, such as removing parts of the description that are Debian-specific and whatnot.
• We then generate a set of wiki files that are then imported into the Directory using a simple import script.

See Debian-2013-03-20 for statistics on our first round of importing from Debian.

Further work on importer

• The first challenge is to figure out what trisquel projects correspond to which FSD projects, and which ones have no match in the other database.

• • I've written a program that takes lines of tab-separated fields and returns info about approximate matches. Once the output is generated, people need to go through it and select the correct choice. You can get the input i used and the output it generated in an attachement to the directory-discuss mailing list.

• • We need someone to make a javascript interface that lets people choose what they think a correct match is. We'll save those result for the steps below.

• Then, a program needs to read from the Trisquel package database, to gather all of the info.

• • malberts was talking on irc about a program (the appnr api used by appnr.com) that downloads apt package info from a repository and then adds the info into a sql database, and offers an api for working with the data.

• Then a program needs to be written to automatically update FSD entries based on the Trisquel data.

• If/when the flagged revs plugin is installed, then those updates can be approved on a case-by-case basis, to make sure that things match, and nothing is broken.